Killswitch
by notmanos
Summary: Almost a year after the Swordfish debacle, Stan puts in motion his own intricate plan for justice and revenge.
1. Part 1

Obviously, none of these characters belong to me, and no copywright infringment is intended. Also, any song lyrics or titles mentioned belong to their respective bands, and no artist infringement is intended. This is pure fiction, and written as a sort of a challenge. Blame, but no flame.   
  
******  
  
KILLSWITCH  
  
Life was code.  
  
From the DNA in your blood to the memory card in your digital camera,everything could be broken down into bytes of quantifiable data,even though only a select few could read the code and make any sense out of it.They were all encrypted in one fashion or another:biological,machine code,all the same,all puzzles waiting to be solved,locks waiting for the right keys.  
  
And nowadays you couldn't go anywhere,make a phone call,log on,withdraw cash from an ATM,even order a pizza,without leaving a digital footprint,a ripple somewhere in the cyberpond,even if it was to small or obscure for anyone to notice.  
  
But Stan noticed.Or at least he noticed the ones he was looking for.  
  
You could change your name,your physical appearance,hell,even your fingerprints,but some patterns were habitual,so knee jerk you were hardly aware of them.When he allowed himself to think about it,he realized he always started shaving his face from the left side first.He had no idea why,but that was the thing with routines;you established them without knowing exactly why.If you did something often enough,it became what you always did.  
  
That morning,Stan stopped himself and shaved the right side of his face first.After all,he wasn't Stan Jobson anymore,was he?  
  
He put in the contacts gently,careful not to tear the exceedingly delicate plastic,and blinked back the tears as he focused on his watch on the side of the sink.8:12.Early,but not so early he couldn't get this started.  
  
He checked his reflection in the small mirror over the basin,combing his wet,green streaked hair out with his fingers.The contacts made his eyes seem as green as the temporary color in his hair,and was there anything more suspect than a color coordinated man?  
  
But that was the point.Hide in plain sight.Be so easily dismissed no one would even think twice about him once the shit hit the fan.  
  
He pulled on the black vinyl pants,getting a slight thrill from the way the satin lining felt gliding up his skin,then put on the see through black mesh shirt.A male prostitute kind of shirt,which made him laugh when he first saw it,it was actually perfect for the guise.It was a shirt for the vain,showing off your physique in hopes of getting laid.Truth be told,he worked long and hard for the body he had,so he didn't mind showing it off,but he didn't think it was something he would wear under any other circumstances. He'd also grown a devilish goatee,the type that was in during the mid-'90's for a while,and dyed it so blonde it almost blended in with his skin.With the lightning bolt earring and the clip on gold eyebrow ring,he looked like a sad poseur, someone too old to be dressed like this and too out of date to be anything but a joke.  
  
Which,again,was the point.  
  
He checked to make sure his tattoo was no longer visible.The make up he'd slapped on it looked phony,discolored,but with the mesh shirt on it was impossible to tell-it mottled the light perfectly.It was a long shot anyone would see it,nonetheless remember it,but he couldn't risk any identifying marks,no matter how small and hard to trace.  
  
He walked out into the main area of his cheap hotel room,and glanced at himself in the full length mirror on the back of the door.He grabbed his 'piece de resistance',azure tinted sunglasses,and put them on."God,what a fucking geek,"he said,laughing at himself.He made an 'l' of his thumb and forefinger and put it against his forehead,sure it fit.All he needed was a fistful of gold chains,and he'd be a walking parody.  
  
But there was only room for one thing around his neck.  
  
He picked it up as he sat down on the edge of the bed.It was a lanyard with a small plastic card-a photo i.d. card,complete with bar code and corporate logo,of Synergic employee Jurgen Mills.In a younger head shot of Stan,PhotoShop-ped to perfection, Jurgen appeared to have joined Synergic looking like a complete geek boy,with bedhead style surfer blond hair sticking up at several parallel angles,Elvis Costello style thick framed glasses (they were,in fact,Costello's glasses-he'd cut and pasted them in),a small silver nose stud,and what Stan felt was the ironic coup de gras,a small 'soul patch' staining his chin like a dark blonde skidmark.  
  
According to their computer,Jurgen Andrew Mills had worked for Synergic for five years,an IT employee from their Palo Alto branch.He was a steady if dull employee,unremarkable from every angle you chose to look at him from-single,living alone in an apartment near Santa Clara with a pet gecko named Hobs.He drove a 2000 model Honda Civic,and took five sick days last year,but only used four days of his vacation time.The funny thing was,Jurgen Mills didn't exist.  
  
Oh sure,he existed in their computers,but if they checked the dead tree stuff (files,papers),they'd discover there were no records at all for this employee,no sign he ever existed,nonetheless worked for the company.  
  
Stan had planted him in their computers three days ago.No one had noticed.And why would they?It would only matter to payroll,and they wouldn't be going through the personnel records until the end of the month.And in exactly twelve hours- well,no,now it was eleven hours and forty seven minutes-a built in time specific 'self destruct' he had inserted into the coding of the Mills file would activate,and completely erase every trace of Mills from their computer.It wouldn't affect Synergic at all;he had no beef with them.  
  
Well,okay,they were a megalomaniacal computer software company that sold deliberately shoddy programs to civilians (non hackers) so they could make a windfall on patches and upgrades and security plugs for their flawed code,but what software company didn't do that?A sucker was born every minute,although he thought P.T. Barnum's axiom should be updated for the new technology to one being born every nanosecond.The more complex the code,the more you could sell the unwary on a huge bill of goods.  
  
Thankfully,the 'dot com boom' had busted,and most companies were cleaning house.If Jurgen did exist,he'd probably be laid off in a couple of months as Synergic trimmed the fat from its branches in an effort to stave off bankruptcy proceedings.He was doing Jurgen a favor by making him implode into corrupted 'junk' code in a few hours.  
  
For all intents and purposes,the plastic I.D. badge was real;made of the same material as the real one,based on the exact same design.If someone handled it,they might notice it was a bit lighter and thinner than most Synergic badges,but who would?And even then,it was unlikely they'd notice,even if it fell off the cord and hit the floor.If something looked authentic enough,the little details didn't matter;counterfeiters had relied on that for centuries.  
  
He put the lanyard around his neck,but tucked the badge beneath his mesh shirt,turning the i.d. so only its blank white back showed through.It was unlikely the hotel clerk downstairs would notice,but here he was not checked in as Jurgen,but as someone named Paul Maynard.He'd paid in cash,so there would be no paper trail,no matter what.  
  
He put on his socks,and then a tiny holster containing what looked like a snub nosed cap pistol,a child's toy.But it was far from that.A grey plastic body made the phony looking gun very light,and he hardly knew it was there,but it was a real gun:plastic bodied,illegal as hell,it contained only two bullets,because after the second shot the friction melted the inner workings and made it a useless chunk of plastic slag.But it was only for worse case scenarios-he hoped he'd never have to fire a single shot, nonetheless two.For the less extreme worse case scenarios,he had himself.  
  
While avoiding the sun so he could get the classic 'hacker's tan' (skin so pale it was almost translucent),he'd been in the gym, learning to kickbox.It seemed he was a natural,and his muscles were the only flaw in the overall disguise,but it would just have to do.The last time he sparred,he accidentally knocked his partner out,a big guy that had several inches and fifty pounds on him.Although he didn't mean to hurt the guy,part of him was glad he had done so,as it proved he was good enough to take someone down.  
  
He slipped on his battered Doc Martens,lug boots as ugly as sin and in for a while about four years ago,then reached behind him,grabbing the messenger bag sitting on the opposite side.It had the Apple logo on it,and was made to carry an iBook,but that's not what was inside.In the cushioned grey bag was a top of the line Ashton Digital Passport 2001 laptop,upgraded to maximum memory capacity,with the Windows XP removed and a customized Solaris operating system installed,along with a few other extras of his own devising.This was the weapon he would be needing the most.  
  
He slipped the strap of the bag over his neck and right shoulder,the weight of the souped up laptop hanging heavily on his left side,and snatched the half empty backpack off the carpet as he got up,the bed making several unpleasant noises as the rusty springs reacted to the shifting weight.He was glad he was not spending the night in this clean but extremely depressing hovel.  
  
He shoved the few items and clothes he brought with him in the nylon backpack,including the clothes he planned to change into afterwards,and returned to the bathroom to finally slip on his watch,a chrome Swatch that struck him as tacky in some indefinable way,and left his hotel room for the last time.  
  
Going down the stairs to the lobby,Stan popped a handful of caffeinated mints in his mouth.He needed to be jazzed,firing on all cylinders,and while adrenaline was fine,it wasn't nearly enough.Not when he was risking his life,and breaking so many goddamn laws it made him laugh when he thought about it.If he got caught,he'd be going back to Leavenworth for approximately four centuries.So he had to make sure he didn't get caught.  
  
He didn't know why he had worried about the desk clerk noticing the i.d.-the man was watching one of those reality shows on television,and never even glanced at him twice as he checked out.  
  
The night was muggy,smoggy and humid in a perfectly California way,making sweat instantly ooze out of his pores,and he was suddenly glad for the mesh t-shirt.It wasn't quite night yet,though;the sky was a half hearted sort of navy blue,a sort of lavender pink at the edges of the horizon between the spires of the buildings,surrounding him on all sides like a titanic security fence.  
  
But for the first time in a long time,he felt good.He was finally making a move to get this attack dog off his ass and this shadow out of his life once and for all.  
  
He got into the silver Saturn rented by yet another man (James Bloom-but he also paid in cash),laying the laptop carefully in the passenger seat,on top of the battered leather jacket he had left inside,but he just threw the backpack in the back seat.Clothes and crap-who cared about that?  
  
As he started the car,he emptied the package of caffeinated mints into his mouth,and his foot bounced impatiently on the floorboard,a combination of the caffeine kicking in and just his eagerness to get this show on the road.  
  
Saturn or not,he made sure he got one with a CD player.Before driving out onto the sluggish and randomly dangerous California highway system (like life,it was long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror),he got the Orbital CD out of his coat and slipped it into the player,so 'Satan' came out of the surrounding speakers as he he drove out of the parking lot of the Rose Court Hotel and headed West,towards the much nicer Palisades Grand Hotel.  
  
The music reminded him of his college days,lots of late nights living on caffeine,junk food,and nicotine,surfing the virtually infant (well,toddler at any rate) World Wide Web and seeing what he could explore,what he could break into,what kind of trouble he could cause.A lot,as it turned out;endless amounts.  
  
At the usenet group where he made several friends of fellow hackers (he suddenly remembered Torvald among them,with a tinge of regret-his screen name had been Phamous,because that's what he intended to become),he had simply been 'Killswitch', a term he pulled out of one of his electronic engineering magazines.He thought it sounded tough,and even hackers weren't above a little macho posturing,even if they couldn't back it up in the real world.Of course he could back it up now,but then he'd been a bean pole of a college kid,more concerned with a moby (great and huge in geek speak) hack than anything else,grades included.Yet he lucked out;even half asleep and coasting,he was more than smart enough to get by.  
  
Still,he hadn't been Killswitch since he got busted by the Feds for fucking up Carnivore (and he was sure that Ragnarok,a prick who used to hang on the usenet board and seemed like a total leech,narc'ed him out).Tonight,though,he thought he should bring Killswitch back from the mental graveyard;he needed to have that sense of fearlessness,of immortality.That feeling that you wouldn't fuck up because failure never factored in to the equation-it was illogical,and based on a faulty premise,and therefore had no reason for being included in the end sum.  
  
Was he arrogant then?Sure,probably.That was a common disease among hackers who were good and knew it.Then he crashed,and got his wings effectively clipped,to mix a metaphor.Maybe it was time to let a little of the arrogance out again.  
  
After all,if he pulled this off,he'd have every single right in the world to gloat.  
  
For a while it haunted why he was still alive while so many others were dead.Because he had an important role to play in faking his death-yes,he got that.But his continued existence afterward bothered him.Stan wanted to think they moved around enough that they couldn't be tracked down,but he knew he was kidding himself.So why was he still alive?  
  
That that raging psychopath could have liked anyone besides himself was unthinkable.So there was only one reason he was not dead yet:he was being held in reserve,in case he was needed again.  
  
Not that he'd ever do anything willingly for the shithead...but that's why Holly was still alive.She was the tool,the thing that they would need to control and manipulate him.She would always be in danger as long as that bastard was alive and running free. Finally,he decided to do something with his aimless,frustrated rage,and cast aside his sense of helplessness.He was not helpless. He was one of the best hackers in the world.He could do something with that.  
  
Stan decided it was time to take the battle to Gabriel.  
  
Now at first,he had no idea how he could possibly do that-the guy was gone,had assumed a new identity,even the Feds thought he was dead.He could be anywhere,and had the money to disappear for good.  
  
But that's when it occurred to him that some habits were very hard to break.  
  
Gabriel liked expensive things,and obviously was accustomed to indulging his every whim.Especially when it came to toys,known to the sane as weapons.  
  
But not ordinary weapons;not those suitcase nukes he could supposedly buy in bulk.It would have to be a rara avis-something expensive,deadly,devastating,something no one had ever had before.  
  
Which is why he was Jurgen Mills,and why he was headed to the Palisades Grand.He had found the weapon.  
  
And he was going to get it first.  
  
He had scoped the area around the hotel yesterday,figuring out the traffic patterns,which way would be the fastest way out,and which would be a good secondary exit if there were unforeseen complications.But he had planned this entire escapade meticulously,and didn't anticipate anything he couldn't handle.Unlike a psychopath he could think of,he didn't plan on hurting anyone.He'd defend himself if and when he had to,and he wasn't going to let anyone stop him.He would leave with the weapon tonight,or he would not leave at all.  
  
Stan parked his bland little Saturn a block over from the swanky Palisades,but had found a shortcut yesterday that would allow him to drop right onto its backyard in no time.Well,so to speak.  
  
The Palisades Grand was a huge skyscraper of a hotel,a massive spire of glass and steel chromed for a 'retro' feel,leaving Stan to wonder if you could feel nostalgia for something that had never existed.It went for an 'old fashioned' glamor,except it was idealized streamlined 'elegance',someone's idea of a past they had only seen in Hannah Barberra cartoons.It stood out on the entire upscale block like a rocket on the perpetual verge of launching.  
  
Stan carefully climbed a cement wall backed up against a Starbucks (used to be an alley,but those were for low life neighborhoods ),and once clear on the other side,he decided he had time to grab a triple espresso before he walked down the street to the Palisades.  
  
As soon as he decided to do something-anything-to get the psycho monkey off his back,the first thing he did was go back to his roots:the usenet hack boards where he met fellow hackers and honed his craft.But he didn't feel comfortable going back in as Killswitch,so he thought of a new i.d. for himself-Phisherman.A terrible pun,but one he perversely enjoyed.  
  
He was surprised to find one of the hackers who had made up a cyber 'gang' with him and Torvald was still active-Alias359. A kid in Tokyo,Sakai,who had been the youngest of them at the time but now must have been in his mid twenties.He was good,but he didn't quite have the brazenness of the truly successful hacker.There were two others in the 'gang'-Rot13,a college kid at M.I.T.,and Zerosum,a guy who worked for a computer company in Texas (the oldest among them at the then startling age of twenty six)-and all he knew was Rot13 got busted for cracking and defacing the Department of Defense website four years back;he hadn't heard about him since.Zerosum seemed to drop off the face of the earth,which was probably for the best,all things considered.It was nice to know Sakai was still alive and kicking,not sucked into some psycho's whacked out scheme for...what was the scheme exactly?As far as Stan could tell,it just seemed to be killing as many people in as many gruesome and odd ways as possible.  
  
Even lurking the boards as Phisherman,he was tempted to reach out to Alias359 on private chat-even if they had never met in person,he seemed like an old friend-but if he was going to make this work,he couldn't risk trusting anyone,not even the only other member of the 'gang' still alive and functioning in the hacker underground.  
  
Phisherman was,as Stan had created him,a twenty three year old wage slave working as a codeslinger for a software company he abhorred (quite possibly Synergic-he'd left enough vague information he could have been referring to Microsoft,Synergic,or even Reveal Studios),and he wanted to do a moby hack,something unforgettable,something to make a name for himself.In other words,a grandstanding,attention craving,stupid kid-most hackers,to be brutally honest.  
  
He managed to ingratiate himself among a group of 'senior' hackers on the board (Sakai among them),and that's when he began to tell a convoluted tale about his father back in Russia:a bullshit story not to necessarily garner sympathy,but to slowly open the door to stranger,seemingly dangerous requests.  
  
In a way,Stan hated himself.He had 'social engineered' (a nice geek way of saying manipulated) these kids-and they were mostly kids-into helping him in what was an extremely dangerous gambit.More dangerous than any of them could possibly ever know. But it had worked.And as far as he knew,no one was dead yet.  
  
He'd asked out of curiosity what happened to Killswitch,just to stroke his ego and see if he was remembered.Some said after he went down (went to prison),he worked for the Feds-which would leave him hopelessly tainted in the hacker world-but Sakai, bless him,was quick to defend him,saying he'd never work for the Feds;he even rejected a plea bargain for a lighter sentence because it would have meant helping the Feds undo the damage he had done to Carnivore.So the basic thought was Killswitch was gone,exiled to the land of civilians because the Feds wouldn't let him touch a computer again.  
  
Gone,but not completely forgotten.True,and yet so very wrong.  
  
As part of his social engineering,he told the hackers his father was being muscled by the Russian mob over a weapons design he had created,but the design was stolen by someone else and smuggled out.What he needed to find was someone-anyone-with direct info on the world's weaponry black market.A lot of those guys weren't online,nonetheless easy to find-no one in such a dangerous game even wanted to risk leaving a digital footprint.  
  
But dedicated hackers could find anyone,even those who were accustomed to hiding under rocks in the civilian world.And a Bulgarian hacker known as Stop666 helped him get in touch with a semi-civilian known to him only by his on line name, Xrayeye.  
  
(Most civilians would probably be shocked to know Bulgaria was the hotbed of hackers in Europe.After the collapse of the Soviet Union,they tried to repurpose themselves as the 'dot com' capitol of the Eastern Bloc.It never worked,and the whole infrastructure collapsed,leaving Bulgaria teeming with bored,out of work codeslingers.A recipe for trouble if there ever was one.)  
  
He knew little about Xrayeye:he spoke very good,although occasionally sloppy,English (the hacker lingua franca worldwide),and from the info he had,Stan believed he worked for a government (or quasi-government) agency,tracking the black market weapons trade.Or perhaps not.Not all the players on the board at any given time had a clear agenda.  
  
The reason he seemed to be throwing 'Phisherman' a bone was because Xrayeye seemed to have a vitriolic hatred of the Russian mob-or perhaps just Russians:his loose use of English didn't always make the distinction clear.  
  
But one night weeks ago,Xrayeye came through for him in a big way.  
  
It seems there were rumors a scientist in a Russian government lab had perfected a 'super weapon' that had been on the drawing board since the waning days of the Cold War,and built a perfectly functioning prototype.The problem was,since the government hadn't bothered to pay him (or any other scientist) for some time,he decided to take off with his prototype and put it on the market for the highest bidder.  
  
One buyer quickly out bid all the others,but the scientist (referred to by Xrayeye as 'M.K.') was wary,because the man was an American.  
  
As soon as he said that,Stan knew exactly who the bidder was.  
  
M.K. had fled to the States,but the 'client' was unwilling to do the deal in America itself-the deal would be on (of all places) a boat,in international territorial waters,which meant even if they were caught,there'd be many questions as to who-if anyone-had jurisdiction.  
  
M.K. had several aliases,only one of which Xrayeye knew ('Boris Zhelov'),but that was enough for Stan to track him down.  
  
He was staying at the Palisades Grand under the very Americanized name 'Steven Kirk' (Captain Kirk?),which was where, ironically enough,Synergic was having its annual end of fiscal year party for most of its employees in the leased out main ballroom.  
  
He didn't think M.K. would be stupid enough to have the weapon-referred to by Xrayeye by its code name,'Peacemeal' (the weapon makers obviously loved irony)-with him,but he wouldn't be far from the thing on the verge of bringing him a cool fifty million dollars (or so it was said.Knowing Gabriel,M.K. would just end up poor and dead,shark food).Which is where the building next door came into it,explaining why he was staying at the Palisades.  
  
The building next door looked like a sparkling clean warehouse,an oddity on this block and in the entire area,nonetheless next to the Palisades Grand.It had a sign out front reading 'Galleon',and everyone took it for an art gallery that never seemed to open.  
  
But what Stan had discovered was this:Galleon was the name of a secure storage facility,but not just any facility.It was owned by the same man who owned the Palisades,namely Synergic's Vice President,James Houten.Under the guise of an art gallery always on the verge of opening,it was in truth a high tech storage facility for the extremely wealthy and secretive,blabbed on the hacker board by an engineer-Borg9-who helped set it up.He had no idea about the exact nature of the software running the system-it was personally created and installed by Houten himself (who,while not exactly a hacker,still didn't qualify as a civilian either),but Borg9 admitted the main computer of the Galleon was 'massive and mondo scary',and he pitied the fool that tried to break into or otherwise hack that security system.  
  
Stan was glad Killswitch had always been foolish.  
  
He gulped down his triple espresso,burning his throat,as he walked down the lightly populated sidewalk to the Palisades Grand, the weight of the laptop inside the bag heavy against his back.He barely glanced at the darkened cinderblock facade of the squat Galleon as he walked past it,more focused on the neon lit front of the Palisades,made truly tacky for the Synergic fete.  
  
From the amount of Lexuses and Explorers in the Palisades's parking lot (they even hired valets-how fucking classy),no one who worked for Synergic and bothered to show up was exactly hurting financially.Or at least not yet.That would have to wait for the inevitable 'house cleaning'.  
  
Security was reasonably tight:he had to show his i.d. badge to three different burly,black suited men as he pushed through the big glass doors and entered the polished wood and golden hued lobby,which was larger than his trailer in Texas.They zapped his bar code with an infrared scanner,and it bleeped an affirmative every time.Jurgen Mills was a recognized employee...well,at least recognized by the computer,at any rate.  
  
Signs pointed down a wide,ecru carpeted corridor to the main ballroom on the ground floor,which was twice as large as the lobby,and over three times as full.Middle of the road rock music played over the sound system at a reasonable level,and he crumpled up his espresso cup before lobbing it into a garbage can,so hyped up on caffeine and adrenaline he could swear his synapses were sparking live wires,his whole body as primed and ready as a loaded gun.But the bullet was in the bag slung across his back.  
  
It wasn't hard for him to mix in to the swarm of people filling the ballroom:there was an even mix between stereotypical suited middle management sycophants and slovenly or outrageously dressed codeslingers,programmers,and geeks from the tech department.It was almost as if there was some invisible bifurcation keeping the groups at a safe distance from one another.  
  
He nodded at people,pretending he belonged here (half the battle),and went up to the bar on the geek side of the room,asking the perfectly blond,stereotypical California surfer boy bartender for an imported beer he had no actual intention of drinking.It was a downer,and he didn't want to come down,not yet.But it was part of his camouflage.  
  
He hadn't been there long when a geek who had dressed nicely for the evening (casual tan suit,open necked white shirt,missing only a tie) came up to stand beside him."Hey-"he glanced at the card around his neck."-Jurgen,I'm uh,Ian."He held up the card around his own neck sheepishly."Ian Burnham,from the Oregon branch."  
  
"Hey,"Stan said casually.Geeks didn't shake hands."So what do you think of California?"  
  
Ian was a reasonably average looking man,with a round face and a thick,combed back shock of brownish black hair,brown eyes guileless behind stylish wire framed glasses.His complexion was a bit clearer than most geeks,which was saying something. "Oh,well,I've been here a couple times.I started out in Palo Alto,but the traffic got to me,you know?"  
  
Stan nodded agreeably,and made all the right noises,simply letting Ian talk.He asked if he knew some of the people at the Palo Alto branch he used to work with,and,recognizing their names from the employee list and the inflections in Ian's voice when he mentioned the names of the people,he agreed and either said they were okay or pains in the asses.He called it right,as Ian chuckled knowingly and agreed.  
  
After a couple of minutes,Stan realized that Ian was,in a subtle,clumsy way,hitting on him.That made him feel really bad.He had expected to come in,chum up to someone staying in the hotel,and swipe their key card,but he had not expected to get picked up.He consoled himself with the knowledge that what he planned to do would fuck up the records,so they would never know if it was a valid key card or not,nonetheless who it might have belonged to.  
  
He played along,not stringing the guy along but not openly discouraging him either,waiting for his chance.  
  
Ian kept his wallet in the front right pocket of his sports jacket-Stan could see the familiar rectangular shape beneath the fabric.He wondered if he kept the key card loose in his pocket,or if it was in the billfold.He was able to coax the fact that he was staying at the Palisades out of him,no shock since they probably got some kind of discount..  
  
In spite of its retro facade,Houten was determined to make this one of the more secure,higher tech hotels.Nearly all the systems were automated,and you needed a key card to use the elevators-a security measure some found extreme,but many of the rich and famous clientele liked the extra barrier between them and the riff raff.Stan didn't need room access;he just needed to get into an elevator.  
  
What most people who hadn't dug up the schematics on line didn't know was that there was a secret,private underground garage for Houten and all his wealthy friends,who wanted to park their Jaguars and Lamborghinis without worrying about them getting stolen or vandalized,or spotted if they were stepping out on the wives or partners.While the elevator went down to the private garage,that wasn't obvious-you needed a special code to access the hidden panel,and another code to go down to the garage.  
  
The underground garage was also where goods were moved in and out of Galleon,to keep it secret.So Stan needed to beat one computer's security system to get to the garage,and another to access Galleon,and that was all before he went after 'Peacemeal'. A million things could go wrong.Some undoubtedly would.But Stan was sure he was more than a match for anything Houten could brainstorm,even on his best day.  
  
Stan set his beer bottle aside on the acrylic topped bar,as if he had finished it,and after a few minutes of debating the merits of UNIX,Ian noticed he was drinkless and offered to buy him one.Stan declined his offer to pay for his drink,but admitted he could use some caffeine.  
  
As Ian turned to get the bartender's attention,Stan darted his hand inside Ian's coat.  
  
He didn't notice,and he kept his room key card loose in his pocket.As he slipped Ian's card into the front pocket of his vinyl pants,Stan wondered if he missed a secondary occupation as a pickpocket. 


	2. Part 2

To keep the cover going for a bit longer,he sipped his espresso and discussed laptops with Ian.He noticed he was carrying his,and Stan explained he was nervous about leaving it in his room,even here.Ian was sympathetic,and admitted that whenever he traveled with his,if he couldn't take it with him he'd lock it in the trunk,hidden under an old blanket. 

It was all very sad,but to be fair machines were generally more constant than people.Stan felt bad that this experience would just cement it for Ian. 

After five minutes,he excused himself to go to the bathroom.Using the milling crowd as a human shield,he snuck out of the ballroom for good. 

He avoided the nearest bank of elevators since they appeared to be in use,and went down a narrow adjoining hallway until he found an elevator not being used by anyone. 

He ran Ian's mag card through the slot built into the control panel,and as soon as the telltale flashed green,'approving' him as a user,he pressed the call button. 

In a moment,the elevator 'dinged',and the mirrored silver doors slid open,revealing red velvet carpeted lift.Stan figured that Houten thought it was 'classy',but as the doors slid closed,he felt like he'd just been shut inside an oversized jewel box. 

He quickly hit the stop button and pulled open the 'emergency' panel beneath the main one,dropping to his knees in front of it.  
Now everything went just as he had planned it,just as he had imagined it in his head.Never once looking up in the direction of the hidden security camera in the top right hand corner,he swung the messenger bag around and laid it in front of him on the floor, pulling it open and removing the laptop.Within twenty seconds he booted it up and connected it via cable to a little access port at the very bottom of the internal emergency panel.A maintenance port for the SysOp workers who got stuck vetting the computer 'brain' for the elevators. 

Stan instantly ran his 'codebreaker' program,which he liked to call 'atomsmasher'.Technically,it should take days-and a supercomputer-to break the code on the Palisades systems.Except Houten was not quite as good at hiding his 'tracks' on the net as he thought;with a little help from his hack board friends,he found all of Houten's email accounts and accounts set up at e-stores (even under aliases).By sneaking into the 'back door' of a supercomputer (this one was at a University),he was able to break every single one of Houten's passwords.But that was not the point of the exercise. 

The point was to see if he had a pattern for setting up his passwords.Every non-civilian knew you made your passwords random collections of numbers,symbols,and letters,so no one would think them up quickly,and it would take the previously mentioned supercomputer days-if not weeks,months,or years-to crack the code. 

And that was where Houten's arrogance had gotten the better of him;he had fallen down on his own job. 

'Atomsmasher' discerned a definite pattern to all his passwords. 

Houten was smart enough to use names that seemed to have no connection to him,combined with numbers.But the problem was he liked to use common women's names with number sequences pulled from pi to the fifteenth digit (such as Charlotte141),and he had programmed 'atomsmasher' to look for just those code word parameters first.Again,it was habit,that dirty little knee jerk response that not even a software programmer could avoid. 

And he had it.It didn't take long for 'atomsmasher' to find the master code for the elevators-Helen589.From there it was no problem to convince the elevator to take him down to the secret garage,and on the way down the program got the master computer to cough up the security codes for the 'gates' downstairs:Denise653 and Sharon14159 (a slight deviation from the three sequential numbers). 

As soon as he had what he wanted he disconnected,rolling the cord up and shoving it in the bag with the laptop,but only after inserting a virus in the elevator's main computer.It was nothing major-a minor worm that they should eradicate by tomorrow-but it would screw up the elevator's ability to drop down to the garage level from now on.If he could keep company from joining him on one side,all the better.He shoved Ian's key card in his front pocket,intending to drop it on the street as soon as possible. 

The elevator opened on a dimly lit parking garage,all cement and whitewashed wood,with dozens of parking slots but only eight expensive cars taking up space.He knew he might run into someone,so he made sure his Jurgen Mills card was out around his neck,and slung the messenger bag over his back like it was just a piece of luggage. 

Sounds echoed in the mostly empty expanse,and he could hear the sound of his own footsteps constantly coming back to him.He was so full of caffeine he was already paranoid,his heart racing in his chest as his thoughts moved at a thousand miles a minute,and now he kept trying to look everywhere at once as surreptitiously as possible.A lot harder than it seemed, especially in a dark garage. 

He reached the security gate unaccosted and unaccompanied,and quickly entered the code to open the metal gate that led to the parking lot of Galleon.It looked the same;there just weren't any cars in the lot. 

Punching in the correct access code not only unlocked the gate and caused it to raise,but deactivated the secondary security systems,so no alarm went off in Galleon.Well,not yet at any rate. 

That was where he really expected trouble. 

It looked dead on the outside,unopened and unpopulated,but if there were valuable artifacts inside-and he knew there was-it wouldn't be unattended.He just hoped they weren't too psychotic and heavily armed. 

He was half way across the parking lot when he became aware of a sound,an electric hum,faint but quite obviously coming from Galleon,since the hotel's elevator was currently out of commission.He ran across the lot,the slap of his boots against the macadam echoing eerily throughout the garage,and reached the elevator before the doors opened,pressing himself flat against   
the wall to its left side. 

He wanted to see who came out of it before they saw him. 

Stan knew if it was just some innocent employee coming off shift,he'd have to make a choice about whether to let them go or knock them out.But he'd worry about that as soon as he knew what he was up against. 

He took several deep breaths through his nose,slowing his own breathing down and calming his racing heart,as the doors slid open with a slight gasp,and he stood stock still,waiting for someone to emerge. 

The man that came out slowly was clearly a security guard:dark suit and white shirt,needless black sunglasses,bristle cut hair, built like a refrigerator.Also,he had the telltale bulge underneath his left arm that couldn't be anything besides a piece.A big piece. 

A radio crackled on the man's hip just then,making him look away as he stepped out into the lot."Wallace,is it Barracuda?"The man on the radio said,his voice broken with static. 

Barracuda?Did they refer to Houten by code name?What were they,the fucking secret service? 

Before he could answer,Stan made his move. 

The guy was several inches taller than him,and probably over a hundred pounds heavier,but he was counting on the element of surprise and the fact that he was wired on adrenaline to carry him over the top. 

As Wallace reached for his radio,Stan spun into a high kick and nailed him flush in his big square face with the heel of his boot.Wallace,caught completely off guard,flew straight back into the elevator,hitting the rear wall with a loud thud,hard enough to jar his radio loose.As it bounced across the floor,he heard the man on the other end say,"Wallace,come in.Is there a problem?" 

Stan quickly stepped in between the doors to keep them from closing,and saw he'd gotten lucky-the big guy was slumped on the floor out cold,blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.But the radio continued to crackle away,the man's voice on the other end growing increasingly suspicious. 

Stan picked up the radio,and hoped the interference was enough to compensate for the fact that he probably sounded nothing like Wallace."Barracuda's here,hold on a sec,"he said,briefly thumbing the send button.He quickly clipped the radio onto the waistband of his pants,so he could hear the security staff:the moment they knew something was wrong,he wanted to be the first to know. 

Luckily,the guy on the other end simply said,"Copy that," and sounded as bored as hell.Nights at Galleon were probably always quiet,and as about as interesting as watching a snail inch along a sidewalk.He hoped that ennui inertia meant someone had snuck a television set in here;maybe they'd miss him planting a virus in the camera system. 

Or this guard flat out in the elevator.Damn it.It wasn't such a lucky shot after all. 

He grabbed the big guy by the ankles and dragged him out of the elevator,which was harder than it looked (he was three hundred pounds of manure in a twenty pound sack),and then,at the last second,grabbed his gun out of his holster-an automatic,of course-and ejected the ammunition clip,which he tossed across the parking garage.He then put the gun back in the man's holster,if only to confuse him.He'd probably draw the weapon before he'd realize it had no more ammo. 

Once inside the elevator, he plugged in the cord and let 'atomsmasher' break the code of Galleon's elevator. Again, it didn't take long (Audrey264535- another slight deviation from the norm), and he used the connection to try and access the main computer of the site. It would probably take longer, so he left the connection intact as he took the elevator up to the lowest floor (he had no idea what alias Zhelov would be using here, but since he didn't think there was that much here, he figured he'd find the stuff under the tightest security and work his way through it). 

Atomsmasher came through for him as soon as he was on floor level. He couldn't access every system (a lot of the security was behind tight firewalls that broke completely from Houten's passwording system- a shame, but a smart move on his part), but he could get the cameras and at least part of the power and air conditioning system. 

He inserted the special virus- actually a hybrid virus/worm he called Alien (after the acid spewing one from the movie of the same name)- into the heart of the computers that ran the security camera network. These cameras didn't record on video but on high definition digital, so not only could no one break in and steal the tape identifying them from the cameras, but they were recorded in crystal clear life on a medium that could be strategically manipulated to show everything, down to the type of sneakers they wore and the type of food stain on the sleeve of their jacket. 

But Houten forgot that while you couldn't pull digital 'tape', you could corrupt the data to the point where nothing usable could be recovered. And that's what Alien was doing now, not so much scrambling codes as digesting the base codes and regurgitating pure gibberish, digital garbage that was the computer equivalent of shit. Alien had a brief shelf life- Stan had programmed it to self destruct after one hour had elapsed- but only so Houten and his tech team couldn't autopsy it and steal his work. It'd be worth a fortune on the business market as a guaranteed way to permanently destroy all electronic data and documents, but he wasn't interested in helping a bunch of crooked CEO's get away with even more crimes against humanity, nonetheless padding Houten's pockets even more. 

As soon as he was sure Alien was doing its work, and no security alert had been issued yet, he called up a menu of the secured areas currently in use. Not many as it turned out. 

There were, according to the schematic he was able to access, thirty three units available, and only eleven were currently in use. Technically everything here was high security, but some things were more high security than others. There were three 'clean rooms' at the back of the complex on the second level, only one of which was in use. The 'clean rooms' were temperature stable and could be pressurized, although the one in use wasn't; it was kept at a cool sixty six degrees, but he didn't think that was really necessary, just a precaution. Peacemeal going off in here- and next to the hotel- could absolutely devastate Houten's wallet. Stan assumed he wouldn't give a shit about the people. 

He was on the second level, so he disconnected the laptop and packed it up again, braced against the wall as the doors slid open, in case security had someone on the level. If they did, he wasn't here yet. 

The radio on his hip picked now to crackle to life. "Wallace, anything to report?" 

He looked carefully down both ends of the empty, abnormally cool concrete and metal halls, and pulled up his radio. Still inside the elevator, he said quietly, "Nothing yet. Hold on." 

He replaced his radio and exited into the hall, aware his fudging was about to come to an end. He was lucky to slide by the first time as Wallace. His luck had probably been all used up. 

So full of caffeine and sugar and adrenaline he thought he might explode, he started jogging down the hall towards the clean rooms, then broke out into a full run, feeling so good it was like he was high. The first half of the plan had gone off without a hitch.He couldn't have hoped for better.He'd have started shouting like a drunken frat boy except he still had the rest of the security guards to contend with. 

The inside of Galleon was like some sort of high tech mausoleum, all cold and grey, sterile in its austerity. He felt bad for the guards who worked full time here, because this kind of bland emptiness would drive him insane. 

He heard the radio on his hip crackle to life, but the message wasn't for him. "Meyer, check on Wallace." 

Yep, he was down to time now, and yet it was all he could do not to laugh. As soon as he got to Peacemeal, he was assured of getting out of here, even if he had to blackmail his way out. 

(Of course, if Peacemeal really was nuclear in basis and not a 'clean' weapon like Xrayeye insisted, he was so screwed it was both funny and tragic.) 

The warehouse was lit by coldly sterile white light, the kind that simulated sunlight and yet remained unparalleled for being completely unflattering. He bet no one looked at any objects du art in here, for fear all they'd see would be daubs of old, washed out paint on peeling canvases. 

He made it to the 'clean room' area without encountering anyone, and he mentally said a little thanks to Houten for insuring his security staff got so bored they didn't even bother to pay attention anymore. Also, Alien was probably working its disruptive magic, putting out a new brand of spaghetti code for the new generation. 

The clean rooms looked much different from the foam core steel doors he passed on the way here. These were metal all right, but painted white, with tiny bullet proof windows in their center, and all hidden within what was essentially a plexiglas 'airlock', a semi-circular antechamber slightly bigger than an ATM vestibule. And to get through the door of the airlock, he needed a code. 

So once again he jacked in the laptop, holding it cradled in one arm and looking around as it worked (he figured he could always claim to be one of Houten's techs, checking out a personal matter for the boss. Thanks to atomsmasher, he knew Houten's private security password-for use on guards too stupid to recognize him or any of his close vetted staff-was Aileron  
22 (what that meant he had no idea-Houten probably just liked the sound of it). 

The little light on top of the small code panel's display went from red to green (pass code: 415926535- Houten had an unhealthy obsession with pi), as Stanley heard the radio on his hip crackle to life. "Meyer to Deviq." 

"What is it, Frank?" Deviq-the guy he scammed earlier-replied. 

"There's no one down here," he said, sounding slightly bewildered. Stan was grateful he'd thought to yank Wallace behind the slight wheelchair accessible ramp. Technically he could be found easily-Wallace was bigger than the ramp-but that would have required Meyer to actually go look. There was an amazing sense of lethargy permeating this place, but then he heard that was true of Synergic too. 

Still, Galleon was essentially bullet proof. Who'd be stupid enough to try and rob this place? And it wasn't like crackers ever got off their fat asses and out of their basements and did stuff like this in real life. 

As soon as he was inside the clean room vestibule, he started humming to himself, thinking in his mind, "I feel stupid, oh so stupid, stupid and witty and wise..." 

"Wallace?" Deviq asked, as Stan tried not to laugh at his own bizarre thoughts. He'd really over done the caffeine; he probably  wouldn't sleep until well into tomorrow. Or the next day. 

It was absolutely exhilarating. It reminded him of the all nighters he'd pull in college, working with his cyberbuds half way around the world to break into the computers of the Japanese stock exchange or the U.S. Treasury or MI5. Never to do damage-they weren't crackers-just to see if they could do it and get away clean, leaving no digital footprints. They did so remarkably well. Stan now wondered if they had the special blessing that various gods seemed to grant to the intensely stupid.  
Because they were. They were smarter than everyone else around them, and yet so very stupid where it counted. 

At least he was carrying on that tradition of stupidity. Alias359 would be proud of him. 

He had just jacked in to open the only clean room in use (through the window he could see nothing-an empty white space, with what looked like a steel chest of drawers built into the wall) when he heard Meyer reply, "He ain't here, Chief. You don't suppose he went over to the Palisades for a drink, do ya?" 

He heard Deviq curse, and Stan laughed. He hadn't even thought about Houten's shindig giving him additional cover. It just seemed like a fortuitous way inside. 

"That fat bastard is so fucking fired if he did," Deviq spat, with a surprising amount of venom. Didn't he hate him? 

Atomsmasher was taking a lot longer on the security code for this door, but he had taken into account that M.K. had thought up the specific code himself, and therefore atomsmasher was programmed to run through Russian words as well. Stan knew very well he could be here all night, but the hard part was over: Alien was loose in the cameras, and the elevators were fucked over royal. He could enter even more destructive worms, viruses, and Trojan horses into Houten's system if he had to: he came in here fully loaded and prepared for war. 

"Should I go check?" Meyer said, with obvious hope in his voice. 

"No," Deviq snapped, and Stan doubted it was surprising to Meyer either. "Get back up here. I'll try his radio again." 

True to his word, Deviq called for Wallace again, over the same frequency. Stan didn't answer. 

"Hey, I'm stuck," Meyer suddenly broke in. 

"In what?" Deviq replied peevishly. 

"The elevator just started and then it stopped. I can't get it to do anything." 

The light on the door's code panel went from red to green, and the lock released with a pneumatic hiss. M.K.'s codeword had been 'koshmar', which-according to the computer-was Russian for 'nightmare'. If Xrayeye had been right about Peacemeal, it definitely was. 

As Deviq continued to curse Meyers out for his idiocy ( "How could anything be wrong with the elevators?" ), Stan entered the clean room with some trepidation, pushing the door gently open, his heart continuing to beat at roughly a hundred miles a minute. The air was so clean in here it had a funny, almost ozone taste, and was so cold he shivered, but it was hardly freezing; it was simply the temperature deviation between here and out there, in the unprotected world. 

In spite of the chill, he was starting to sweat as he approached the steel drawers, the only containment chambers in the room. If he was wrong, Holly was really going to lose her dad, and he could only guess how messy his demise would be. 

Stan knew if he pulled this off everyone would be puzzled as to who could engineer such a technically savvy heist-especially when the few cameras capable of catching him (parking garage-old fashioned video tape, he could do nothing about those but try and stick to the shadows and never look at them directly) would reveal a single man-but Gabriel would guess immediately it was him. And of course he'd have his people look for him. 

His people were in for a real disappointment. Stanley and Holly Jobson died last year, shortly after Thanksgiving, on a rainy night on a highway outside of Boston. Semi truck crossed the center line and completely totaled the 1999 BMW Stan was driving, wedging the car between the semi cab and a highway divider, killing Holly instantly. Stanley died two hours later in Boston General Hospital while undergoing an operation for his massive head injuries. Since there was no real family for either of them, they were buried with little ceremony and fanfare at a cemetery only three miles from the spot where they had died. Ironic. Sad. 

Complete bullshit. 

If they went digging for digital, they'd find that sorrowful tale, complete with a small newspaper article "Truck Car Collision Kills Two" that gives a few terse details on their sudden but not uncommon deaths, and death certificates buried in an on line archive. If they went looking for dead tree confirmation-the actual death certificate, physical hospital records, even gravestones -they'd fine nothing. Because Stan sat in a hotel room with his super charged laptop and planted all of it, hacking into the appropriate agencies and burying these little nuggets of information on their systems like he had buried Jurgen Mills's files in Synergic's corporate office. 

Holly was at a boarding school up in Canada, a real exclusive, high security sort of place where celebrities and politicians sent their kids, and she was there under the name of a very real girl whose identity he had 'borrowed' for the meantime to protect her. Hopefully this would all be over soon and he would pull Holly out, and the real Samantha Jane Morton would never know her identity had been 'hijacked'. And after the trail he left, he dared them to find her. 

Finding him would be difficult, but much easier than finding Holly. And that was the whole point. If he made things too easy, they'd know it was a trap. 

Laptop back in its bag and slung over his back, he carefully slid open the only occupied drawer, and had to stop himself from cringing instinctively as the lead lined drawer revealed itself to have nothing more than a silver steel suitcase inside of it.  
Locked of course-combination, non-digital-but Stan figured with enough time he could crack it: in spite of his own occasional doubts, he was not a moron, and he was especially good with numbers and codes. Life was code, and given the time and opportunity, he was sure he could break it all down. 

He grabbed the black handle of the suitcase, and found it to be remarkably heavy: maybe sixty pounds. Considering it was supposed to be a weapon of mass destruction, it needed some kind of heft to make up for the fact that it could be so easily crammed in a suitcase. 

As he left the clean room and the 'airlock' antechamber with the heavy metal suitcase in his hand, he could hear Deviq and Meyer still arguing over the radio about whether or not there was something wrong with the elevator. Deviq clearly thought Meyer was a stupid,helpless asshole , and Meyers clearly thought Deviq was a sadistic, pigheaded jerk. They were probably both right. 

Even as he ran down the sterile metal and cement corridor, heading towards the 'street' exit, he couldn't quite believe things had gone this well. He'd pay for it somewhere else -entropy hit in increments, or it hit all at once: there seemed to be no getting around that- but his turn of luck (along with way too much caffeine) had made him euphoric. It was hard not to laugh. 

The street exit was locked and 'wired'- meaning if you didn't have a code, not only would it not open, but an alarm would trip. But Stan had a code; a good, high level code. Houten's code: Sandy653. 

He punched it into the number pad by the metal door with the bent knuckle of his right index finger (no fingerprints), just as he heard a third, unidentified guard say, "Uh, boss, it looks like somethin's goin' wrong with the cameras." 

The telltale on the panel lit green and the door released with a heavy metallic clank, and Stan took the radio off his belt, wiping it on the mesh shirt as best he could, and dropped it on the floor. It bounced once before its outer casing broke open, and the guts of wiring spilled out like the contents of a high tech piñata. 

He shoved the door open with his shoulder and ran outside, into the warmer, smoggier night air, and let out a loud, braying laugh as he ran across the lot, down to where he had parked his rental car. This had been almost too easy. 

And so much fun. He hadn't counted on it being so much fucking fun. 

Stan barely remembered to dump Ian's key card before he returned to the alley by the coffee place. He did feel like he was tripping on some amazing perfect drug, something that kept his synapses snapping like sparks, and made him more alive than...ever. More completely alive than he had ever felt in his entire life. 

And yet, in his left hand, he carried an instrument of perfect death for both man and machine. 

As soon as he got back to his rental car, he put the suitcase in the back seat and tried to decide if his back up option wouldn't be the best course of action here. He couldn't continue to have this thing with him, not if it was going to work, but considering its size, he had another idea. 

He assumed M. K. told the buyer what he'd be getting, more or less, so he wouldn't think he was being hosed when he was given nothing but a suitcase. Perhaps this would work out even better than he thought. 

Stan was careful not to speed as he left the scene, the new plan percolating in his head. It would be an insane risk...but what hadn't been? 

The problem remained in the second half of the plan.  So far so good, but as soon as he had Peacemeal secured, this was his game to lose. And he could, badly; one screw up and it was all over. 

But what a rush. He didn't think it would be this...exhilarating. As he drove down Highway 101, strangely empty for this time of night in any stretch of Southern California, he found it almost impossible not to stomp on the accelerator, and as he let out a triumphant shout of victory he pounded the steering wheel with his hand, hurting his palm and barely feeling it. It had gone perfectly, without a hitch, and now he had the power. 

He had all the power in the world, in fact. The switch was his to throw, the button his to push, the trigger his to pull. 

It was a high. Tremendous, almost sexual in its intensity, and he knew the minute he let it run away with him was the moment he would stop existing as a human being and would become a monster. Like Gabriel. 

Even though the rental was air conditioned, he rolled down his window so the exhaust laden night air would hit him square in the face, and he took several deep breaths through his nose, letting the oxygen infusion steady his heart beat and level out the adrenaline. He was feeling almost normal, just wired on caffeine, as he pulled into the car rental place by L.A.X. 

He parked and pulled out of the glove box all his rental papers, a baseball cap, and a navy blue t-shirt folded into a sloppy square. He unfolded the shirt and pulled it on over the black mesh one, hiding it, and pulled off the clip on eyebrow ring and the lightning bolt earring, shoving them both in his pocket. He pulled his hair back as best he could and put on the baseball cap (actually with a Lakers logo across the front), tucking all of the green highlights underneath. James Bloom was going in to return his rental. The fact that he was wearing vinyl pants couldn't be helped, but it was doubtful anyone would notice. 

He slipped his blue tinted glasses inside his backpack before slipping the straps over his shoulders, then slipped on the strap of his messenger bag (containing his precious computer) , and last but not least, as soon as he was out of the car, he reached back in and grabbed the suitcase containing Peacemeal. 

It wasn't terribly busy inside the rental agency, but busy enough that no one gave him a second glance, not even the bored worker behind the counter, who took his keys and information with a sullen air, and again Stan found it hard not to start laughing. This was all going so well he just knew some bad shit was bound to hit the fan soon enough. 

He walked past a nearly ubiquitous armed security guard on his way out, and the burly Hispanic man gave him a friendly nod, which Stan returned, fully aware his heavy metal suitcase had a weapon of mass destruction in it and he had just passed by the man with little more than that acknowledging tip of his head. 

Of course, he didn't fit the terrorist profile, and let's face it, a third rate car rental place was not going to be a likely terrorist target. But Gabriel had done him the favor of teaching him the world - even outside of cyberspace - was far more dangerous than he ever imagined. 

Down the street was a cheap chain hotel, and in its parking lot was a blue Chevy Cavalier rented that morning from an agency in Costa Mesa by a man named Jacob Morrow. Stan had parked it there before coming to rent the Saturn in Bloom's name, and start the Jurgen Mills charade. It all seemed needlessly intricate and convoluted, but he had to play the game. This wasn't something as weak as espionage, or as pale as theft. It was full blooded, full on life or death. No joke, no do overs - it was for all the money. And he had no intention of losing. 

He put his luggage (the backpack, from which he taken out the Chevy's keys) in the back of the stifling Cavalier (it had been sitting in full sun in an unshaded parking lot all day), rested his laptop still in the shoulder bag on the floor on the passenger side, and finally secured the suitcase in the small trunk. As soon as he started the car, he cranked the air conditioner on full, turned up the radio - pre-set to the only decent rock station in the area - and started driving out to a California town known as Ontario, where a man named John Webb (who looked suspiciously like Stan) had a cheap but adequate room at a no tell motel there. 

He was somewhere near Monterey Park when he took a short cut and noticed that perfect little spot he had seen in the daytime when driving up to L.A. It looked even more deserted and remote now, like a haunted little graveyard that mysteriously appeared between rambling suburban sprawl and clumsy gentrification projects. After thinking about what he might need and briefly wondering where he was supposed to get it, he turned back around, and within ten minutes found the right spot. 

Only in L.A. would you find a Home Depot open this late. 

He found the items quickly in the cluttered warehouse store, where he bet an army of small children got lost every year, only to grow up and become sales associates, and paid in cash so as not to leave a paper trail. No one asked him why he was buying these things at this time of night, but then again, the man the next checkstand over was buying a wheelbarrow, a bag of cow manure, a hand saw, and two bags of quick lime. He didn't even want to know what that was about. 


	3. Part 3

He drove back to Monterey Park, parked on a side street well out of view from everything, slipped on the new, heavy duty work gloves, grabbed his other purchases, and only then took the suitcase out of the trunk and walked back to his perfectly abandoned spot. 

He labored for hours, longer than he thought, and he finally had to strip off both his shirts and toss them over the low hanging branch of a weeping willow, an old, impressive tree that did a wonderful job of concealing him from the occasional piercing beams of headlights as cars sped by on the road. He also had the misfortune to learn that vinyl pants not only had little give, they didn't 'breathe' either, and as a result he now had sweat pooling in his boots. 

Once he was done, the sweat had cooled on his chest, and he was starting to get cold. He pulled the t-shirt back on, throwing the mesh one over his shoulder like a scarf, and packed up his gear. Satisfied that it looked as undisturbed as he had found it, he walked back to the Chevy, this time tossing the heavy suitcase in the back seat. Since he no longer had much use for one of his purchase, he tossed it in among a dense copse of Ponderosa pines and blue spruce trees growing in the back of someone's lot bordering the street. It might be here when he got back, or not, but it didn't matter. He didn't really think he'd need it. 

He dumped the now sweaty gloves, but this time he tossed them in a roadside ditch with a tiny layer of mud and filthy water at the bottom. He didn't think things like the gloves would keep out in the suburban 'wilds'. 

The combination of work and passing time made him realize he was tired, and maybe a little sore. He knew he was bound to crash from the adrenaline/caffeine rush, and when he did he'd do it big. Half way to Ontario he started to feel vaguely nauseous and shaky, so he pulled off to get some fast food before continuing on, as food would slow the dive bombing of his system for a little while. 

The key to his motel room was in the glove box. As soon as he loaded himself down with all of his gear - Peacemeal included - he gladly went inside his tiny cracker box of a room. 

He didn't care that it was all fake wood veneer particle board and furniture older than he was rescued third hand from pawnshops, or that the air conditioner sounded like a 747 making an emergency landing in the parking lot: he was exhausted beyond the telling of it. He peeled off his clothes, aware the vinyl pants now smelled like partially melted plastic wrap, and got in the shower, the knocking of the hot water pipe against the wall fading after sixty seconds or so. He stood under the pounding stream of chlorine scented water until it ran clear, and all the green temporary tint was out of his hair. He'd almost forgotten about the contacts until he realized his vision was blurry, and he simply pulled them out and let them wash down the drain: he had no use for them anymore. 

When he got out of the stall, drying himself with a stiff white towel starched to near death, he caught his reflection in the steam fogged mirror over the chipped sink. He looked like himself again - not Jurgen, James, Jacob, or John - just Stan, but he looked like a weary one, a man who had seen too much and done too much, and now couldn't quite shake the weight from his soul. 

Yeah, that was about right. 

In the the tiny cubbyhole that made up the 'closet' stood a battered leather suitcase, holding some of his more usual clothes and a few other items, but he didn't even feel like getting dressed. Despite the rattling, wheezing air conditioner, the room was still sticky hot, and all he was motivated to do was double check the lock on the door and make sure his 'do not disturb' sign was firmly in place. Then he collapsed on his lumpy bed, and fell into an exhausted sleep, too tired to even feel anxious about the horrible weapon in the suitcase at the end of his bed. 

** 

    Stan knew he was dreaming, but it didn't make it any better. 

He was standing in the middle of what used to be a downtown street, now nothing more than scarred and blasted rubble on an urban battlefield. Sunlight glinted hard off the shards of pulverized glass among the sea of bodies and mangled cars, the air thick with the scent of blood and the crazy making, incessant drone of flies. If he stared too long at the tangle of severed limbs and torn bodies that covered the street like a bloody human carpet, he would see people he knew and loved, even those already dead. He didn't want to see them; he didn't want to see this. Again. 

He closed his eyes and told himself to wake up, feeling dizzy and nauseous, and the buzzing of the flies became a voice in his ear. "Shouldn't have started a game you can't finish," the voice said, taunting him, the ground starting to tremble as the waves of screams came rolling in like a distant thunder. "Shouldn't have played with the big boys when you can't take the heat, when you can't roll with the pain, when you can't drink the blood from your hands-" 

"Shut up!" He shouted, clapping his hands to his ears - 

- and waking up freezing on his uncomfortable mattress, the plodding thud of a newborn headache starting to come to life behind his eyes. 

Hazy yellow light was bleeding in around the edges of the flimsy beige curtains, and he squinted at the travel alarm clock he'd set up on the nightstand to see it was time to get going. For having slept for seven hours, he felt remarkably ill rested. 

He got up and turned off the rattling air conditioner before retreating to the bathroom for another hot shower, aware by the time he got out he might be dying for the cold. 

It was only when he got out of the shower that he realized he'd left the only really good towel on his bed, and he hadn't taken a damn thing out of his suitcase either. So he walked naked and dripping out into the front room, only to find that cold had become stuffy in a span of fifteen minutes. He knew that meant it was another roasting California day, although even at its worst it never felt quite as bad as a Texas heat wave. There it seemed like the air was trying to suck all the moisture from your body and leave you a desiccated husk for the crows to pick clean.  
He pulled out his battered suitcase and sat on the end of the bed to open it, letting the stuffy air dry his skin as he dug through the few belongings he had brought with him. 

The first thing he found was his bottle of Excedrin Migraine tablets, and he dry swallowed three of them, hoping to take the edge off the growing pain in his head. He then  dug through the bag and started pulling out clothes at random :grey boxers, sport socks, worn blue jeans, pumpkin orange t-shirt. He threw the clothes back on the bed and took his shaving kit to the bathroom before he decided not to bother shaving, at least not now. A little five o' clock shadow might add to his disreputable but casual appearance. 

By the time he finished getting dressed, his sun bleached hair was almost completely dry, and he simply combed it out with his fingers before pulling his weathered and unseasonable leather jacket out of the bag. He really didn't know how long it would take for them to find him, but he supposed he ought to kill his time carefully. 

He packed up his things and loaded up the car before checking out, donning the black aviator sunglasses tucked in the pocket of his jacket. The harried Pakistani motel manager barely gave him a second glance. 

Stan was on his way out of town when he pulled into the lot of a decent looking cafe and decided to get some breakfast, if only to quiet the acidic growling of his stomach. 

He perused the morning paper as he waited for his Spanish omelet, but as he expected there was no mention of a theft at the technically unopened Galleon, or at the neighboring Palisades Grand, which he thought might be the cover story. 

From what he understood, Peacemeal was the realization of a dark dream. 

Ever since the A bomb tests of the forties and fifties, all the 'super powers' (and several other nations, especially China) had been searching for a 'cleaner' weapon of mass destruction, something that would leave the targeted area more available for safer exploitation. The neutron bomb was considered an improvement - killing people but leaving buildings intact - but there was that pesky radiation problem still, so it wasn't perfect. 

Eventually the scientists pinned their hopes on making a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons, or as it was shorthanded in the research community, an EMP.  An EMP would not only kill all people within its detonation radius, but wipe out all computer records, whether on disk or on hard drives. It was a gigantic magnetizing pulse, even lead shielding might not protect your files, and in this day of high technology it would cripple most governments and societies even more than a direct nuclear strike. But making a 'clean' one - non-radioactive - had been a continual, almost insurmountable problem. 

Until M. K. hit on a breakthrough. 

Xrayeye was unable to explain it in English, but M. K. supposedly had come up with a workable 'clean' prototype, not only clean but portable; the 'suitcase bomb' of everyone's worst nightmares. Even its code name,'Peacemeal', was supposedly a play on words: PeaceMEal' (backwards, there was the EMP). The Chinese and American governments, hard at work on their own clean EMP weapons, claimed it still couldn't be done, and yet several spies for both sides had been intercepted before they could access M.K.'s lab. There was a fear it had been done, the code had been cracked, and now Stan was afraid he had the living proof in a steel suitcase in the trunk of his car. 

The omelet came, and while it was palatable, it was a disappointment. It reminded him of one of the few things he liked about Texas. He knew of this great greasy spoon, Maybelle's, where the Spanish omelet was stuffed with olives and green chilies, and jalapeños so hot they'd make your eyes water. Also they used shreds of chorizo, a spicy Mexican sausage that was delicious, as long as you never stopped to wonder about what it was made of. 

But it was the only thing he missed about Texas. Otherwise he hated almost everything about it: the unrelenting heat, the sun blasted landscape (especially in and around the oil field), the huge, vicious bugs, the suffocating nights when he'd be forced to sleep on the roof of his trailer just to get cool air, and if he never saw another scorpion in his life he'd be a happy man. 

But he missed the simplicity of his life, when he had nothing else to do but work on oil pumps and his golf game and fret over whether he'd ever see Holly again.  The days before he got to watch so many people die, and for what? Nothing. It seemed like it was all for nothing. Carnage on the way to more carnage. 

It made him long for machine simplicity. He had always liked machines - and code - better than people. 

Mathematics, the basics for all machines and codes, was rigidly linear, had set rules that simply had to be obeyed. Even stupid machines like the oil pumps had clear, set rules; know the rules, and nothing could go wrong that you couldn't handle within those simple, regimented boundaries. 

People weren't like that; people weren't really linear. They were these sloppy, emotional messes, unpredictable by nature, closed systems of pure entropy.  You could try and predict them to some degree, but there'd usually be something you couldn't predict, a variable that would spring out of nowhere, an action that would not have been anticipated. And that's where Gabriel went wrong; he thought he could predict him all the way through. He thought he'd never put together exactly why he was still alive. He thought he'd simply be grateful to be alive and never think anything more of it. 

And Stan tried that. He really did. But it was hard to sleep at night remembering all the people that died, the ones he saw killed right in front of him, the ones killed out of his presence. 

Just numbers. Cogs in the machine, numerators in the code, and for a while he thought he was going to go crazy. 

If he concentrated on Holly, on keeping moving, on building his viruses and daemons and Trojan horses and worms, on occasionally drinking the memories to oblivion, he didn't have to think about it. He didn't have to think about the dead, or the sword dangling over their heads. 

It finally came to the point where he realized he'd have to do something, or just let himself go mad. He just couldn't keep living the way he was. Even though, all things considered, it would have been the easiest thing to do. 

It was honestly frightening how easy it had been for him to steal Peacemeal. It was as easy as hacking into NORAD, which was frightening enough on its own. 

There was no security. There was just the false sense of it, something that let you sleep at night even though it wasn't true. And Stan still wasn't sure he wasn't going insane. Well, if he was, what could he do about it? 

He ate mechanically, hardly noticing what he was eating, staring at the newspaper spread before him on the  formica table and not seeing a word of it. He was thinking of detonation yields and casualty projections. 

Xrayeye said M.K. couldn't guarantee the yield without a direct test, but he estimated it to be close to a medium tactical weapon: detonated in the downtown area of a major city, he figured it could kill in the thousands, and do millions to billions of dollars worth of damage to computers, businesses, economies, societies. The damage would be honestly unmeasurable until long after the event; but in the meantime, chaos would reign. And anyone who knew what had been coming would probably be able to exploit the situation to their advantage. M. K. apparently thought no one would be 'stupid' enough to use Peacemeal, because the country that used it would be begging for a nuclear or missile hit from another country. 

He hadn't thought of terrorists or freelancers like Gabriel. They would use it. And it might be nothing more than a ploy, a dupe, a way to make another government do what he wanted them to do. He was a born manipulator. 

Stan knew if he thought of himself as the only thing standing between Gabriel and Peacemeal, the only thing keeping him from releasing this horror on the world, he would get sick. So he didn't think about it. 

As he folded up the newspaper, his eyes scudded over a small black and white photo of a round faced young woman with milk pale straight hair spilling over her shoulder. She'd been missing for several days, after leaving her Contra Costa home for a concert in  Hollywood; they'd just found her body in a ditch in West Covina.  It reminded him of his first attempt to dig up info on Gabriel. 

He decided to try and track down the only person he knew by their potential real name (or at least 'working' name) among Gabriel's crew: Helga. 

A high class call girl, he was sure he could find her and pay her for any information she had on Gabriel, any conversations she might have heard indicating where he might be headed after all of this was over. She might not know anything, she might be too scared to talk, but she was his best starting point. 

What he discovered was the call girl who went by the name of Helga was found floating off the Santa Monica pier several days after the bank heist. She'd been shot execution style, once in the back of the head with a .38 caliber bullet, and she'd been in the water long enough that there was no evidence to recover; it took days to identify her.   
Gabriel had tied up all his loose ends with ruthless efficiency; there was no information left for either the Feds or Stan to follow. 

But one day, Stan started to think about habits, and he realized he knew all he needed to get Gabriel. He just had to get going, and try and anticipate his move before he made it. Easier said than done, but he had his abilities with code, with computers and machines, and they were tools he could use that Gabriel couldn't. Used correctly, he could get the man, no matter how cyberspace averse he was. 

And he did. Stan almost couldn't believe it. 

Now the question was, when would Gabriel catch up to him?And how violent would his initial response be?  
He bet he'd find out soon enough. 

Stan finished his breakfast, gulping down his orange juice but ignoring the diesel grade coffee, and paid the bored cashier, who seemed to be waiting for someone interesting to come through the door. 

The sunlight seemed harsh, so he donned his sunglasses (black, not blue)  and embarked on the long drive down to Costa Mesa. It was mostly long due to the legendarily  awful California traffic, but he was in no hurry and it didn't bother him. 

It was amazing how irrelevant many things had become since...well,everything. Facing death was said to be a life altering experience, but he didn't think his was as life altering as most people's were.  He felt strangely detached from his life now; instead of wanting to live every moment, or appreciate what he had, he was no longer afraid of dying. He no longer cared what happened to him. It all seemed perfectly irrelevant. 

He wanted to make sure Holly was okay, and he wanted to make sure Gabriel paid for everything he had done, but otherwise he no longer had any concerns at all. Maybe it was depression; maybe it was post traumatic shock, or some bullshit thing like that, but he didn't really think so. For the first time, he felt he had some real clarity in his life.  
He had a purpose, a mission, and everything afterward didn't matter. Maybe it was just good to finally have a real purpose in life. 

After returning the rental, he retrieved his own car, a  well preserved old black Mustang he had bought out of a sense of nostalgia, and a need for a vehicle that could move fast, take damage, and be abandoned if necessary. When necessary. 

Although he briefly entertained the idea of never getting caught, it was a fleeting fantasy he didn't consider for long. He would be caught up with. So he decided to orchestrate it, be in control the whole time. This time he would have the ending he wanted. 

Peacemeal briefcase secure in the trunk, he drove on, headed for the ramshackle trailer on the edge of Death Valley. Bought a week ago in Arizona by a man named Westerfeld and dumped rather inauspiciously in an abandoned camping spot on the edge of the desert, it looked like the home of a very desperate and needy man, who was asking to be evicted as soon as the property owners realized he found the only working working sewer , water and gas lines and was using them for himself. 

If anyone bothered to search the blasted desert wasteland, where coyote tracks and rattlesnake paths were more abundant than the creosote bushes and tumbleweeds, they might - if they searched carefully and well - find a few things that were obviously not desert born. Human things. High tech things. 

But people didn't look for such things in empty  desolations like this. It wouldn't even occur to them to look - and besides, where did you hide things in a place as open as this? In the desert, there was no place to hide. 

Or so it was believed. 

By the time Stan reached the rusting hulk of the Rambler, the sky had turned a vivid sherbet orange, shading to red near the bloody eye of the slowly setting sun. It was beautiful, turning the golden sand a burnt sienna, but Stan only noticed all the time slipping away. 

He wondered how Holly was. He supposed he should email her, let her know he was okay, ask how she was doing. Maybe later, when he could think of something to say. 

The trailer was as hot as an oven, containing all the heat of the day within its frail metal skin, so he turned on the small air conditioning unit, which was even louder than the one in the motel and even more poorly maintained. He stripped off his clothes and got into a bathtub full of tepid water, to wash off the sweat and remain cool until the a.c. brought the temperature down to a more manageable level. 

He remembered to grab a beer from the mini fringe, so he had something to drink, but he hadn't eat since that diner back in Ontario, and the alcohol seemed to hit him harder than usual; he could feel his head swimming in the confines of his skull, like a trapped animal frantically looking for a way out. 

The beer quickly got warm, and with half the can gone, he abandoned it on the vinyl tiled bathroom floor, some ugly brown pattern on white. Maybe it was supposed to be fleur de lis pattern, but it looked like nothing more than a repeating pattern of rust on a grimy white background. Stan stared at it until he thought he could make out a face in it, elongated grotesquely and missing eyes, screaming as its hair seemed to burn. 

He got out of the tub, the water no longer cooling but uncomfortably warm, and went out to what passed for a 'kitchen' in the tiny trailer, hoping to find a snack. Maybe some food would help him get a grip on things. 

He wrapped a towel around his waist -the air conditioner had brought the temp down enough that he felt almost cold without one- and the water continuing to drip down his body, from his hair to his face to his neck to his chest, finally down his legs, and he knew it was his imagination that it felt oily, almost viscous. But he didn't look down at the linoleum to confirm that. 

It hadn't occurred to him to stock the place with food, but he found a bag of chips, and he sat at the tiny table that made up the dining/living room area (the bed was a fold out couch older than Holly), grabbing a Jolt cola from the fridge (no more beer for him, not now), and booted up his laptop as he ate mechanically, the potato chips noisy afterthoughts that never quite infringed on his concentration. 

(Old piece of shit trailer or not, Stan made sure he could access the internet here - he was not being cut off from his life's blood ever again.) 

He surfed all the spots Xrayeye had mentioned to him, and found the theft of Peacemeal was now a red hot rumor. The Russian mob was currently being blamed, although some thought American 'black ops' agents got it. But then again, most of these people seemed to think Peacemeal was a nuclear 'suitcase' bomb, and Stan knew, since his teeth or hair hadn't fallen out, that wasn't the case. 

He surfed over to the altgroup where the hackers hung, and found out they were all gabbing about Houten getting 'reamed but good' by a 'master cracker'. They thought it was a cracker working for some shadowy government agency, though, especially since no one had heard of a guy quite that good on the net. But then he read a post by his old friend Alias359: "Maybe Killswitch isn't as dead as we thought he was." 

Sakai had sussed him. He felt a small thrill of pride that he had recognized his work. If Sakai was here, he would have kissed him. 

(And he'd probably have never gotten within fifty feet of him again, but hell, it'd still be worth it.) 

He rubbed the sweating can of pop across his forehead as he went to one of his email accounts, a special place that would disguise your router address so you couldn't be traced. He set up Holly with an account here, and told her to use it as her primary, so no one could ever trace her. He remembered her looking up at him and grimacing, like he was being an embarrassing parental unit again, and she said, with a far too adult sigh, "You're being paranoid again, Dad." 

"That's part of my job," he insisted. 

He knew that maybe he'd been taking it to far. Still, what was that old saw about better safe than sorry? 

But no one was safe, so that shot that cliché to hell and back. 

He wrote a fairly long email, never mentioning the 'business' he had to attend to, but asking her how she was doing, and how things were at the school, a very subtle trolling for information about her surroundings and any 'new people' around the school. He was sure she was fine at the school - he'd have never left her there if he doubted it for a second - but he wanted to hear it from her. 

Among the papers he had left with a lawyer he had on a confidential retainer was a will that left all his money, scattered across several different bank accounts, to Holly. Her custody, until the age of eighteen, would go to a woman named Claire Fortier, a woman who worked at the school. He had told her he may not have long to live (she promised not to tell Holly), and being a kind woman, with adopted children of her own, she agreed to look after Holly in case he 'succumbed' while gone, as he had no family she could go to, and he didn't want her to end up a ward of the State. Claire had no idea about the money he had, or that Holly would get, and he'd have it no other way. Claire would get something for her trouble, but only if she took care of Holly; he trusted the lawyer to make sure of that. 

He was not planning to die. But he had to prepare for the worst, if only for her sake. And, if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't care at all. He supposed that should bother him, but he had no time to think about it now. 

He had no emails in his account worth reading, so he went back to the hackers altgroup, just for a finally glance. It felt cooler in the trailer now, the dry air having effective wicked all the water off his skin and mostly out of his hair, and his flesh was starting to feel tight on his skeleton, almost itchy. Just the heat and the stress of the days, nothing more. 

He'd come back to the altgroup in time to find a new, mysterious message posted by someone who seemed to leave as soon as they came in. The message said simply: "You can't hide from me, Stan." 

Seeing it,he laughed, and slammed his palm on the rickety table, making it shake like it was on the verge of collapsing. He knew he was supposed to be afraid - he had been discovered, and there was no doubting that was a threat. Gabriel was probably figuring as soon as Stan saw that, he would get on the move, go for the border if he hadn't already, trying to disappear into the wide and relatively lawless expanse of Mexico. Or may he just expected him to run, to rabbit in incoherent fear. 

What Stan did was log off, finish his soda and wipe his greasy, crumb laden hands on his thin towel as he stood up, out of the tiny, diner like vinyl booth. He took the towel off his waist and left it on the seat, walking naked to the couch, where the duffle bag that contained all the clothes he had brought with him sat like an obedient dog. He decide he was comfortable as he was, but pulled on a pair of loose black shorts, swim trunks that could pass for boxers, and vise versa. 

Feeling as dressed as he was going to be until the temperature dropped another fifteen degrees, he left the bag open and retrieved from behind the ratty green sofa a scuffed nine iron and a shoe box full of assorted and mostly nicked golf balls. He made sure they were all the florescently colored type - yellow, with a few oranges, greens, and pinks in there - so no birds or desert wildlife would think they had the great fortune of stumbling upon an egg. Even the idea of innocent animals getting killed bothered him. He felt incidentally responsible for enough deaths, and didn't even want animal blood on his hands. 

As soon as he stepped outside the trailer, the air seemed rough, warm and as hostile as a shove, and the orange sky was starting to deepen to the color of an angry bruise. It was pretty, but may have been prettier under different circumstances. 

He simply tossed the golf club up onto the roof, where it landed with a hollow thud, and climbed up the small ladder he had set up at the far end of the Rambler, using only one hand, balancing the box of balls in his other hand until he was close enough to the flat roof to just shove it up across the edge. 

The roof was as level as an a landing strip, and tar papered inexpertly, so it curled up at the edges and corners like sunburned skin sloughing off a body. It also felt like warm sandpaper under his bare feet, gritty with just a hint of stickiness, and he barely noticed it as he retrieved his club, and started setting up shots. 

His back to the distant highway, he started hitting balls into the brush, the fringe of creosote and tumbleweeds on the desert floor looking like some fungal growth marring the perfection of the horizon. 

Taking up a stance was a sort of Zen, an emptying of the mind that was as automatic as it was troubling.  After placing a golf ball near a depression that kept it from rolling, he held the nine iron firmly yet gently in his hands, arms rigid, feet planted hip distance apart, and swung  with a graceful arc. He made solid contact with the ball, but didn't bother to see where it had gone. He could slice to his heart's content here; it didn't matter where it went. He wasn't even aiming. 

As he set down another nuclear orange ball, he wondered if this was madness.  If so, it really wasn't bad as he had always feared. There was a strange sort of inner peace when you no longer cared about anything, not even your own life or lack thereof. 

He hit balls aimlessly into the desert, until the box was just as empty as the scenery, and the entirety of the sky had darkened to the color of a spoiled plum. It was still too light for the stars to appear, although the fingernail crescent of the moon was starting to glow in the lower right quadrant of the vast and lowering sky. The air had cooled, enough for the breeze to raise goosebumps on his legs, but it was still stuffy and nowhere near comfortable enough to sleep.  
For a long while, Stan sat on the edge of the roof, legs dangling over the side, and wondered how Gabriel's men were going to come and get him. Helicopter?Car?Hydroplane was probably right out. Strangely, he wished they'd hurry up. 

Finally he climbed down, leaving his club and the empty box on the roof, and had another beer as the trailer turned slowly arctic, and tried to watch a little television. He hadn't set it up for cable, so he just had the antenna on his little portable t.v., and since he was in the middle of nowhere the reception was really bad. But he drank himself to mellowness as he aced all the questions (well, answers) on  "Jeopardy", and found himself remembering several lines from an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Man, sometimes he was sadder than he realized, but he was too drunk to care. 

He supposed he should get dressed before the troopers stormed in the door, but before he could rouse himself to do it, he fell into a dreamless, alcohol influenced sleep on the couch, in front of the flickering light of the cathode ray tube. For once, he was almost a normal person. 

Stan woke up with a bad taste in his mouth, like he'd been chewing on a used sweatsock, a sour stomach, and a pounding headache, which the canned laughter on the t.v. set was making worse. Who in the hell showed old reruns of "Sandford and Son" this early in the morning? 

Glancing blearily at the rooster shaped clock near the sink (it came with the trailer), he quickly amended that to early afternoon. No wonder he had to pee so bad. 

He turned off the set and went off to the bathroom, where his bladder ceased hurting but his head and stomach were still threatening violent revolution. 


	4. Part 4

He was out of Excedrin, and there was none in the trailer's tiny bathroom. There was none of the rest of his usual hangover remedy either: wheat bread (for dry toast), orange juice (to get the bad taste out of his mouth), and Pepto Bismol (a swig of the chalky pink stuff to settle his stomach). 

The noise of the water hitting the bathtub was too explosively loud for his head to take right now, so he skipped the shower and just got dressed, pulling a pair of jeans on over his boxers, finding a slightly wrinkled white t-shirt and shrugging it on. A glance in the mirror told him he looked pained and hung over, like he'd slept badly and hadn't bothered to shave for two days, and it was all painfully true. 

He ran his fingers through his tousled hair, barely getting it under control, and then grabbed a baseball cap (this with a Linux penguin on it) and slipped on some cheap black sunglasses before grabbing his coat and heading out in the brutal light of the hard afternoon sun. 

How lame was he to have an actual hangover after only a couple of beers? Man, he was getting old. 

In spite of the sunglasses, the light seemed too bright, shooting into his eyeballs and straight into the back of his brain like shards of broken glass, and his eyes were watering by the time he reached the nearest store, a Safeway about twenty miles away. The parking lot was mostly empty, and he held high hopes that he could just grab his meds and get going. He'd have hated to miss his own kidnapping. 

In spite of the glaring sunlight spilling through the store's front wall of windows, some sadist had turned on the harsh fluorescents overhead, so he had to keep his sunglasses on as he loaded up his basket with everything he felt he needed: Excedrin Migraine tablets (the really big bottle); Pepto Bismol (only the pint size), a loaf of wheatberry bread; another six pack of Jolt cola; a pint of orange juice; a jar of peanut butter (suddenly the dry toast didn't sound good enough); a small pre - wrapped sub sandwich from the deli, on the off chance he got his appetite back in full; two Hershey bars with almonds; caffeinated cinnamon mints and a tin of regular but "curiously strong" wintergreen mints. More than he initially came for, but he didn't know how long Gabriel was going to be. Obviously he was getting old too. 

In the parking lot, he took a hearty swig of the Pepto Bismol, and then washed down three Excedrins with the juice (orange juice tasted terrible with Pepto Bismol - but everything tasted terrible with Pepto Bismol). He drank the rest of the orange juice on the hypnotically dull drive back, the small, ugly little franchise stores that made up this tiny niche of civilization giving way to the bland beige monotony of the desert wastes. He didn't know which was better or worse. 

He was starting to feel better, though, the jackhammers behind his temples slowly subsiding, his roiling stomach settling down, and by the time he arrived at his trailer, he was feeling like his old self, the caffeine in the pills inching him up into a better state of mind. 

It helped his awareness too, because the instant he pulled up, he knew something was different, something was wrong. 

It took Stan a moment, but then he figured it out - tire tracks in the sand. Not just the Mustang's - something heavier, with all terrain tires. 

"If I could, I would let it go," he sang along with U2 on the radio, then shut the car off. He supposed he could have backed out and tried to escape, but surely there was a hidden vehicle out there, waiting for the opportunity to run him right off the road. Maybe more than one. 

No; he had a plan, and he was playing his game, not the one Gabriel surely expected. He just couldn't let on too soon that he was pulling the strings. 

He pocketed his keys, grabbing the plastic grocery bags out of the passenger seat, and went to face the music. 

Stan was barely inside the door when some greasy Eurotrash thug shoved a gun in his face. 

He grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him violently inside, and Stan hit the edge of the 'kitchen' counter hard as gun boy slammed the door. As he straightened up, he saw another broad shouldered thug in an ill fitting grey Armani suit, looking uncomfortable in the growing heat of the trailer (he had yet to turn on the air conditioning), standing wedged in the door of the bathroom. He already knew another was sitting on the couch as a familiar voice said, crisp and hard, "Where is it, Stan?" 

Ginger. Or whatever the fuck her real name was. 

"What, no welcome home kiss?" He said sarcastically, putting his grocery bags in the sink (well, there was nowhere else to put them). 

She had changed her hair. It was still short, but now straight and swept back, lightened to a driftwood sort of hue. It may have been a wig; he couldn't tell. But he knew her bright blue eyes were courtesy of contacts. Otherwise she was still the same lithe woman as before, wearing a flimsy golden yellow dress that highlighted her pushed up cleavage (but clashed somewhat with her cocoa colored skin), and a high slit that showed off as much leg as legally possible. She was wearing stilettos too, and he didn't know how she got up the trailer's steps in those. Maybe one of the muscle boys carried her. 

"Can the crap, Stanley," she replied, her voice icy and derisive. "Did you actually think you could pull this off?" 

He didn't answer, simply started unpacking his groceries, the closest thugs constantly tracking him with their weapons as he did so. What, did they think he had bought an Uzi at the Safeway? 

"Do you actually think I care what you and your master think?" He replied coldly,  putting the cola in the locker sized fridge. 

The goon by the front door clipped him on the back of the head with the butt of his gun, sending him crashing head first into the paneling. For a moment, stars sparkled in the darkness of his vision, and he tasted blood in his mouth from biting into his own cheek, but as his vision came back with the painful throbbing of the newly forming lump on the back of his head, Stan laughed. He reached around to touch the back of his head. 

"There's a good tactic - knock me around. Oh yeah, I'll wanna cooperate then. You'd be better off sucking my dick this time, Ginger. Or, can I call you Mary Anne? You look more like a Mary Anne to me." 

He glanced at his hand after pulling it away from the back of his head: there was blood on his fingertips. Must have opened up a cut on his scalp. 

"Gabriel drove you over the edge, didn't he?" She asked, although it verged on not being a question. 

He didn't answer, simply opened the jar of peanut butter, then the loaf of bread. He could feel a warm itch on his scalp as blood started trickling through his hair, down the back of his head. He heard her foot tapping an impatient tattoo on the trailer floor as he went ahead and spread some peanut butter on a slice of bread. When he opened the drawer to get a bread knife, the thug who brained him shoved the muzzle of the gun right into his ear. Stan laughed again as he opened the drawer and pulled out what he wanted. "Hey, Gilligan, did you not inform your trained apes here that if they blow my fucking head off, you'll never get what you want?" 

She stopped tapping her foot, and just by the tension in the air, he guessed she didn't like being referred to as Gilligan. "We can blow off other body parts." 

He smiled humorlessly, not even glancing at her as he made his untoasted peanut butter toast. Well, there was no sense in dicking around with the toaster now. "Haven't you got it through your head, Skipper? I really don't care what you do to me. What do I have to live for?" 

"Holly." 

As if on cue. Man, he could have written a script for this. "Try again, Lovey." The blood was now dribbling down the back of his neck. That was the funny thing; blood actually ran like water. In the movies and on television, it seemed almost viscous, like crimson oil, but in real life it wasn't anything like that. If you gave it an opening, your blood seemed eager to escape, like your body was just its prison. 

"The obituaries were a cute touch, Stanley. But we know she's alive and you stashed her away." 

He scoffed, and turned around, holding his piece of peanut butter smeared bread. He glared at the greasy thug now in front of him, and reluctantly, with a lip curling sneer, he backed up, enough that Stan could slip into the booth that was the rest of the dining room/kitchen set up. "It was only a partial fake, Professor. Maybe you should have looked closer." He bit into the bread violently, chewing it even though he had almost no saliva left. 

Her eyes were hard, cold, boring into him like drill bits. "Meaning what?" 

It wasn't hard to look angry, as he was, and he hated this cold blooded bitch and her reptilian boyfriend. To his surprise, it wasn't hard to call up tears either; he could bring them to his eyes easily by working on the gash inside his cheek, and peanut butter in an open cut hurt more than he would have thought. "Meaning, you stupid bitch, there was a fucking car accident, and Holly - " he paused to gather himself, let the bread fall to the table and closed his eyes, as if trying to hold back tears and control his rage. It was almost surreal; he was faking none of this. He thought he would have to, but he didn't. " - she's dead, bitch. You hear me?! She's dead. You took everything you fucking could from me so why don't you leave me in fucking peace!" The last few words came out as an anguished roar, and when he opened his eyes to glare balefully at her, tears spilled down his cheeks like the blood down the back of his neck. He was gripping the edge of the table so tight his knuckles were bone white. 

Her face remained an expressionless mask, but he saw the flicker of doubt in her eyes, and knew that was all he needed. As long as the seed of doubt was planted, this was his game to lose. "You're lying," she said, but he heard the hesitation - she was hoping he was. She really didn't know. 

He just stared at her in open hate, letting the tears continue to fall as he slouched back in the booth, feeling a muscle deep inside his chest clench like a fist. He was never good with expressing emotions, or even being with people; he was always happier with the sterile simplicity of machines. Being in the world, he had learned it was almost all about repressing your emotions, not actually expressing them, and now he was just letting it all out. The funny thing was, while he did his best to keep his expression sorrowful, the tears were springing from rage. He hated her and her goons so much he was almost shaking with fury; he wanted to hurt these motherfuckers. He wanted to kill them. "Maybe Gabe should look into improving his intelligence," he muttered, wiping away tears and snot with his forearm. The tickle of blood dripping down his neck was getting lost, drowned by the throbbing of his head. 

She crossed her arms over her chest, her posture defiant, but the doubt was there in her eyes, almost but not quite pity. "We've searched this dump, and we know it isn't here. So where did you hide it, Stan?" Her voice was still strident, but softened ever so slightly. 

Like that skirted sociopath felt anything for anyone but herself. He glanced up at her, finding it hard to stop the tears, even as he gave her a sickly smile. "Did it ever even occur to you that I have no fucking idea what you're talking about?" 

Her eyes narrowed, the certainty slamming back into place like a visor. "Hair dye and tinted glasses aren't a very good disguise." 

"You should know," he replied. He then turned towards the fridge, and the guy in the bathroom doorway edged out further, gun first. "Can I get a drink without you blowing my foot off, Rambo?" 

His porcine blue eyes glanced at Ginger, who must have nodded assent, because he gestured at the fridge violently, his version of an okay. They must have searched the fridge too. He wondered if Ginger got a thrill pawing through his boxers. 

"Must be in the car," she said quietly, as if thinking aloud. He sat back with his soda, and she said, "Give us the keys, or we'll just break out your windows." 

"Classy. Steal a lot of cars, Skipper?" He reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the Mustang, which he lobbed with excessive force towards the oily haired, vending machine sized thug by the door, the one who had clubbed him on the head with the gun butt. He caught the keys with his free hand, never taking the Glock off of him. He gave Stan a look of pure hate, and it made him smile, almost laugh. He hoped he was the one who tried to open the trunk. 

"Help him," Ginger said, to the guy covering the dangerous bathroom. "Len and I can handle him." Her eyes scudded over Stan once more, and her crimson painted lips thinned in distaste. She had just dismissed him as any sort of threat, and seemed almost disappointed.  
He took a gulp of his soda to cover the smile - just you wait, honey. He was not the same naive idiot she had conned a year ago, no matter what he had led her to believe. 

Len must have been the thug with the blond ponytail and dark shades sitting on the couch. He looked relaxed, so good at killing without a single trace of conscience that he wouldn't even bother to stand up to blow your head off. This was probably a really boring gig for him. 

If he was patient, it was about to get more interesting. 

As the two nameless goons left, Ginger grabbed his laptop from where she had left it on the couch, beside Hitman Len. "This is a hell of a machine, Stan," she said, then scowled at him in open disapproval. "It was a shame to ruin it." 

On his beloved Ashton Digital Passport laptop was a custom made program called a 'daemon' in hacker parlance, running unnoticed in the background of everything he did on the laptop. As soon as he booted up the computer, he had to hit the spacebar three times, activate the caps lock, and as soon as the cursor appeared, type in "/XOQ/FYJ/876" - basically a sample Unix path code, but rendered to pure gibberish. If someone tried to crack it, they would have sixteen seconds after the moment the cursor appeared (assuming they got the space bar and caps lock pattern right), and at that rate, with the help of a supercomputer, they might get it in several years, but it would be more likely decades or longer. Because if that exact code wasn't entered in the allotted seconds, the daemon, rendered quiescent by that code, would come to life. 

And what the daemon did was destroy all the data on the hard drive, and crash the computer while it was at it. Rebooting it would be unsuccessful, and even if you could force it somehow, not only would you have gibberish, code digested like what Alien had been built to do to the security cameras in Galleon, but the daemon also would have activated its clone  'spores' - invasive viruses that would transfer to the first computer someone used to try and crack it. It would do to their machines what it had done to Stan's computer. He shuddered to think what would happen if the thing got loose on the internet, because he had to admit the daemon was perhaps the most nasty and violent thing he had ever created. Alien had been its cousin. 

"You should have known no one would have computer security like me, Gilligan," he finally said, putting his can of Jolt aside. He glanced out the bread box sized window, past the frilly green curtains that reminded him of low rent diners that went by homey names such as 'Ma's', and saw the goons headed for his Mustang. 

There'd be no problem until someone walked back to open the trunk. It took Stan a moment to remember where one of them was - he blamed the hangover - but he was pretty sure he parked in the right spot. 

"You know we're going to take what we need off of it, no matter what," she threatened, placing the now useless laptop on the small swath of linoleum that passed for the kitchen counter. 

He smiled at her, and it was genuine, and refreshingly evil. "You go ahead, sweetheart. You'll be opening up a Pandora's box of shit you can't even begin to comprehend." 

She took up her defiant stance again, arms crossed, one knee bent, head cocked to the side, studying him like a particularly grotesque insect. Bending that leg had made the dress ride up slightly higher on the right, and he saw a leather strap on her thigh that could only be a gun holster. "I'm not an idiot, Stan. I'm as good as you are." 

"Bullshit. If you were, Gabriel wouldn't have need me or Phamous." 

That made her brows draw together in confusion, even as she frowned at the ego blow. Outside, the goons had come up empty in their search of the car interior. "Who?" 

"Torvald. The guy whose head you had blown off, remember?" 

She smiled in a patronizing way. "Ah, hacker name. What was yours again, Stan?" 

"Killswitch." 

That made her chuckle. Outside, one of them was starting to move towards the back of the car. "How delightfully childish." 

He stood up, going through the motions of throwing his empty soda can away, into a paper bag in the small cabinet beneath the sink. Len didn't move a muscle, but Stan knew he never took his eyes off of him. 

Ginger, as he thought she might, sashayed closer to him in an exaggerated, mock seductive manner, but stayed out of arm's reach. She did place a loving hand on the hard metal and plastic case of the laptop, and caressed it like a pet. "I hate to tell you this, Killswitch, but you're no longer the best codeslinger in town." 

He turned to face her, and met her eyes with a look so hard and triumphant her smug grin faltered, and she even took a step back, as if suddenly wary of his rage. "Yes I am," Stan insisted, giving her a predator's leering smile. 

And it was just then that the car exploded. 

The explosive buried under the sand was actually a homemade pressure mine, constructed with the help of the Anarchist's Cookbook, and the wonderfully illegal sections of the World Wide Web - as soon as the man stepped on it, boom. There was nothing more stupid and dangerous than building explosives, but he found it was just like building a virus with the laws of chemistry involved, not math. 

He had actually halved the strength of the explosive, figuring the car's gas tank would more than contribute to the concussive force. 

And of course Peacemeal was no longer in the trunk, or none of them in a mile radius would have survived. 

The moment of the explosion, the few meager windows of the trailer blew out,shards  bouncing around the trailer like razor blade hail, and it rocked on its weak foundation, the front side wall of the trailer warping and blowing inward, as if hit from the outside by a giant fist. Even in the empty rush of white noise that followed the blast, Stan was sure he heard a startled shout from Ginger. And even as he hit the edge of the counter hard, he wasn't knocked so senseless that he didn't remember to drop down to the floor, avoiding the worst of it even as part of the trailer's roof near the front collapsed inward, and the floor near the door buckled, making the entire trailer rock like a boulder set precariously on the top lip of a very steep hill. 

He didn't know if the trailer would withstand the blast; but he honestly hadn't cared. 

Just like the explosion outside the bank, he survived, and not only that, he remained conscious. 

He scrambled forward on his hands and knees even before all the glass stopped flying, and was on top of the stunned Ginger before she even knew he was there. 

He pulled the gun out of the holster on her thigh and aimed it at Len as the hit man struggled up from the floor, leveling his own weapon at him. 

But Stan fired first. 

He had practiced at his own firing range, set up in this empty part of the desert, where he could shoot all night and attract no attention at all. The practice had paid off. 

He barely felt the recoil of her tiny gun, which while small, still packed a punch, as the new hole in the center of Len's forehead attested to. The gun must have had fragmenting bullets or hollow points, because the back of Len's skull blew out spectacularly, painting the remains of the couch with blood and brain matter as he dropped like a side of beef, gun still in his hand. 

Stan could taste cordite as he saw the startled Ginger try and grab her gun back, get her knees up to kick him off, but he slammed the pistol down, the butt catching her square in the forehead. He checked it a bit, so she was still conscious, but barely so. 

He could hear the crackling of fire beyond the hollow white noise, smell the acrid scent of burning metal, gasoline, and flesh, a scent he knew so well it haunted his nightmares. 

It felt like the fire was in his blood, not consuming him but fueling him; he felt righteous in his rage as it filled him with adrenaline that seemed to be super - charged. 

He pinned Ginger's legs down with his own knees, and grabbed both her wrists with his left hand before pinning them on the floor, over her head, so he had to lean forward and jam the hot gun barrel right between her pretty little eyes. 

The heat brought her back. Eyes glazed with semi - consciousness and pain, she looked up at his face and the gun with equal measures of shock and fear, and only squirmed briefly before she realized she was completely helpless.   

"How does it feel?" He shouted into her face, so angry he wasn't breathing more than he was gulping air like cheap wine. "How does it feel?!" 

"Y- you don't want to do this, Stanley," she said, trying on a soothing voice, like he was nothing more than a crying child. And she was trying desperately to hide her own terror. "You're not a killer." 

That made him laugh mirthlessly, a cackle that threatened to run away with him, keep going, and take what remained of his sanity with him. "Yes I am, sweetheart. You and Gabriel made me one." The tears came back, but he blamed them on the stinging black smoke now wafting into the trailer from the gashes in the aluminum siding. 

Maybe cocky Ginger finally realized her standard line of bullshit wasn't going to work, and appealing to his humanity or his pity just wasn't going to fly. She nervously licked her lips, and tried a different tack. "We were never going to kill you, Stanley. That wasn't part of the plan." 

"Do you think I give a fuck if I live or die?" He snapped, sending spittle flying down onto her plastically pretty face.  "I have nothing to live for. Holly's dead. All I've had left to keep me going is the idea of finally killing you fucks." 

"We didn't know about Holly, Stan. We thought you planted that." She had bought the story. But then again, it was hard not to when you had some crazed, crying madman pinning you down, augering a warm gun barrel slowly into the skin of your forehead in a burning trailer.  
"Is that what happened to you? Did you suffer a head injury? Were you seriously hurt?" 

He laughed contemptuously at her attempts at diagnosis. "Am I ever seriously hurt, sugar? I was just fucking dandy. I only had my little girl bleed to death in my lap, but hey, I should be able to shake that one off, huh?" 

Actual pity flashed in her eyes, and he admired her ability to fake it under such trying circumstances. What an actress. "We didn't kill her." 

He uttered a breathless laugh, leering at her. "Yes you did. You fucked me over, you fucked over my pathetic life, and now I have nothing but a fistful of blood money to show for it. I wasn't gonna get Holly mixed up in this shit like you amoral fucks did, but as soon as I lost her, what did I have to lose? My life? Take it baby. Fucking take it!" 

She was breathing harder now, both panicked and fighting against the smoke. He wondered if she'd dare to take the seduction angle with him now, offer to fuck him. Sex was such a cheap weapon, but damn if she didn't like to use it.  "I can help you, Stanley. Gabriel's treating me like his lap dog - " 

"You are his lap dog," he sneered. "Don't you even try and con your way out of this, or maybe I'll blow off another body part." He jammed the gun into the tiny fold of skin where the ear met the skull. "Never wear a matching set of earrings again." 

Her eyes widened in fear. She believed him all right. "Stan, please, don't. You don't want to sink to this level. You're a good man." 

"You mean a sucker, a chump. Not anymore, Skipper. Did you know that whole desert is mined? It is. More of your goons come, and they're scattered for the vultures to pick clean."  
A bit of an exaggeration, but he'd already lied his fucking head off - what was the harm in one more? 

Something seemed to dawn in her eyes, understanding perhaps, even as irritation from the smoke brought tears to them. "You didn't do this alone, did you? Are you freelancing?" 

The heat filling the trailer had nothing to do with the desert sun; he'd have to get out of here soon, or smoke inhalation would probably kill him. He gave her a feral grin, all teeth, and said, "They promised me Gabriel. How could I refuse?" 

More fear in her eyes, quite genuine. He knew Gabriel - or whatever his real name was - was wanted by several groups, illegal ones along with legal ones, and he also knew that Ging and her slippery man would never entirely credit him with the ability to pull off this scam all by himself. But as long as they could get back what they considered theirs, they wouldn't worry about it. 

Burning insulation was starting to float down from the buckled ceiling like satanic snowflakes, and he decided it was time to leave. "Do you wanna live, sweetheart?" 

"You know I do." 

"Then play nice. I'll let you up, but the moment you do somethin' I don't like, I'm putting a bullet in your leg. And that's just for starters. Got it?" 

She nodded, and he shoved himself off of her, staying out of kicking range, with the gun still leveled at her. She moved slowly and deliberately, sitting up with tears spilling from her irritated eyes, and she coughed, bringing a hand to her aching head. She was probably in no mood to fight because they were seemingly trapped in a burning trailer, and she wanted to know more about Stan's mysterious 'employers'. 

Still keeping her covered, he backed up and opened the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed the paper bag aside. There was a large rectangle cut into the back of the cabinet, exposing the outside. From the way the wing nuts were askew, it was obvious that the goons had removed the panel during their search, probably thinking it was a secret stash and being disappointed to find it was just an odd hole to the outside. What it was was an emergency escape hatch - it was a tight fit, but he knew he could just crawl through. 

Stan didn't bother with the wing nuts holding the panel in place; he just punched a hole in the particle board, and the rest of it gave way, falling through the gap. He didn't realize how dark and smoke occluded it had become inside until the sunlight stabbed through the hole like a spotlight. He crawled in first, knowing there was no room for Ginger to sneak up on him, and said, "Follow me." 

Of course there was a two foot fall to the sand, but he knew it and was prepared for it, going down arms first and rolling on impact. He never let go of the gun. 

He was on his feet and walking away from the trailer when Ginger fell indelicately through the hole, apparently expecting something that wasn't there. He was able to see she was wearing blue thong underwear, though. Hell of a thing to wear when you were anticipating killing someone. Maybe she was planning to topless sunbathe later. 

She picked herself up, staggering slightly as her heels sunk into the sand, and she gave him a pouty look as she brushed the dust off of herself and straightened out her dress. "Now what?" 

"Now you take me to your car,Ging. Mine seems to be on fire." 

Amazing how her sense of humor had fled her since she was on the wrong end of the gun. She gave him a look like she just bit down on a lemon wedge in her tuna salad, and started walking away, headed towards the direction of the road, always glancing back over her shoulder at him. 

"How many goons you got waitin' for you?" He wondered, following her so close she'd be an excellent human shield. 

She didn't answer right away, so he knew she was probably lying. "Six. Armed with a lot more than a cap pistol." 

"It's your gun," he pointed out. 

She ignored that. "So what's the plan, Stan? Gonna try and blast your way out of here?" 

"If I have to. I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with you yet. You'd be a nice prize for my employers, but it'd be funnier to hand you over to the feds." He hoped that really got to her. 

It must have - her spine seemed to stiffen, and she said, "Turn me over, and you turn yourself in." 

"You're assuming I care again." 

"Did you like prison that much, Stan?" 

"I doubt my new employers would let me live that long. Would Gabriel let you?" 

She didn't answer that. He didn't think she would. 

There was so little traffic on this tiny highway offshoot that the only noise was the crackling of the flames as they consumed the trailer and finished off the Mustang, the air reeking of gasoline and slagging metal, the sickening odor of roasting flesh and rendered fat so far below the miasma of choking smoke it was hardly noticeable. 

Still, one of the goons was very stupid, and Stan heard the slam of a car door even before he saw any movement. He grabbed Ginger around the waist with one arm, startling a yelp out of her as he pressed the muzzle of the gun into the side of her neck. "She's the first to go," he shouted. "And maybe you don't care, but I bet Gabriel does! Show yourselves, hands up, drop the guns! Now!" 

By grabbing her around the waist like he did, he pinned one of Ginger's arms to her side, so she had only one free hand, and couldn't do much with it. Not that she would dare - a bullet through the neck would kill her, but much more slowly than a shot to the head. From the way she had gone rigid, he was sure she knew that. 

"Do what he says!" She shouted, and that seemed to do it. As he walked towards the cracked grey ribbon of road, men started appearing in the ocean of sand, their overly gelled hair as shiny slick as oil in the relentless sunlight. 

He could see vehicles too; attempts at camouflage ranged from middling (partially blocked by clumps of creosote and tumbleweeds) to extremely poor (pulled over at the side of the road like an abandoned vehicle). So far he could only see two vehicles and four heads, but he was waiting for more. 

As the four men, all built like various models of refrigerators in ill fitting suits, started slowly walking out to the edge of the road, all dropping one gun (yeah, right - like they all just carried just one piece), Stan shouted, "Freeze!" 

They did, all looking as bored as men with IQ's in the double digits could. "Slowly, I want you all to drop your pants," he ordered. 

"What?" The biggest guy (with black hair and a face so smushed in it looked like he was whacked with a snow shovel) exclaimed, torn between being horrified or amused. 

"Do it! There are other mines out here, and one of you dickheads is standing right next to one. Should I set it off?" 

They exchanged wary glances, and then, moving with varying degrees of slowness, they started to undo their belts and let their pants drop to their ankles. Belatedly, he hoped they were all wearing underwear. 

"What the hell's this about?" Ginger asked, clearly thinking he had lost what little mind he had left. 


	5. Part 5

He didn't answer her. Dropping trou had revealed hairy legs, and some ankle holsters with the gun butts just visible at the top of the puddles of their pants. He had expected that, but he didn't care about the guns; the whole point of this exercise was to slow them down. 

"On the ground, now," he ordered. "Face first, hands on your heads." 

"What are you, a fucking cop?" The big guy snapped, but despite the moment of defiance, he did as he was told. They all did. 

"Are the keys in the truck?" He asked Ginger. 

She didn't want to answer him at first, but he dug the gun barrel deeper into her neck, and she said, "Yes, okay? Stop trying to give me a tracheotomy." 

"Don't try me, Ging," he hissed in her ear. "You have no idea how badly I want to hurt you." 

That wasn't a lie; he did want to hurt her, as much as hurting a woman disgusted him. But she was willing to hurt him and Holly, and therefore she had lost whatever gender immunity she had. As he basically carried her to the nearest vehicle, he asked, mostly out of spiteful curiosity, "How many people have you killed, Skipper?" 

"I've never killed anyone." 

"Never lie to the maniac with the gun." 

"What do you want me to say, Stanley?" 

Someone moved, so he whistled sharply to let them know they'd been spotted, and they stopped. He shoved Ginger around to the passenger side of the large SUV, inexpertly hidden behind the creosote, and said, "I want you to shut up and drive." 

She gave him that pouty look again, like he was just annoying her, and as soon as she opened the door he shoved her violently inside, and she yelped, more surprised than anything. As she pulled herself into the driver's seat, she straightened out her rucked up skirt and gave him an acrid look that could have peeled paint off the truck. "You get your jollies pushing women around?" 

"You're not a woman," he replied, keeping the gun leveled on her as he got in the passenger's seat and slammed the door. "You don't count." 

"Where the hell am I driving?" 

"Towards Abandon." 

Ginger gave him a sidelong glance, raising an eyebrow. Too small a town to have warranted her notice. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Thataway, pardner." 

She hardly looked amused, but she gunned the engine, and pulled out wildly onto the pitted road,  speeding away as if she really did want to escape her useless protectors. A glance in the rearview showed the men getting up and hastily pulling up their pants. 

"So where are we going?" She asked again. 

"You'll see," he said, being deliberately obtuse. He wanted her to squirm. 

He succeeded. After fidgeting in the leather seat, she asked, "Who are you working for?" 

He grinned at her humorlessly. "Ah, now that would be telling." 

"Is there someone else? Or are you doing this on your own?" She said that disdainfully, as if trying to get a rise out of him. A nice try, but he already knew the moment you got really emotional was the moment you lost control of a situation. 

"What, you think I'm some stupid James Bond villain? I'm going to tell you all my evil plans, so you can escape and foil me before the final reel? No, darlin', I don't think so. So, yeah, I'm working this all by myself. I found out about Galleon and Zhelov and Peacemeal and the nighttime transfer via boat in international waters all by myself. I'm a genius, honey, remember?" 

From the way she suddenly paled and stared at him with a single eye, she hadn't been aware he knew that much. It was also clear he had convinced her he was working for another group, as she would never believe he could find out so much on his own. Her grip tightened on the steering wheel, making her knuckles turn white, and finally she said, "The feds wouldn't do this. You can't be working for them." 

He said nothing, and showed no reaction, just kept staring ahead and glancing into the rearview to check for pursuers. That made her even more nervous. "NSA?" She wondered. 

"Told you honey, Homey don't play that." They weren't pursuing. Either they were afraid he'd hurt Ginger before they could hurt him (and thereby spark the wrath of Gabriel), or there was a tracker in the truck -GPS - that would allow them to intercept them at any time. He was betting on the latter; that's why Ginger didn't seem terribly concerned either. 

"What's in Abandon?" 

He gave her a small, humorless smile. "A gas station minimart, a trailer park, a bar, and a smoke shop, I think. Not exactly party central." 

"So why are we going there?" 

"I never said we were. I said we were going in that direction." 

He smiled at the sour look that earned him. "So where the fuck are we going?" 

"I'll let you know when we get there." 

He wondered if she'd ever realize her hate just amused him. 

The sky was a remarkably pale blue, so washed out by the sun that it was virtually colorless, and even the road looked bleached out, black macadam turning ash grey, as crumbly as stale bread at the edges where it met the ocher ground. 

They were in the middle of nowhere, driving for the end of nowhere, surrounded on both sides by endless expanses of sand, broken only by creosote, tumbleweeds and cactus, heat adapted wildflowers adding tiny spots of color to the otherwise sunbleached landscape. 

They drove for miles without speaking, the only sound the thrum of the tires on the blacktop and the hum of the air conditioner, and finally he saw, ahead on the far right, a jagged ridge of rock cliffs like the spinal column of some fearsome dinosaur, once red but washed out by the sun to an anemic salmon hue. "We're goin' off road," he told her, gesturing to a run down path just to the left of a large boulder. 

"Why?" 

Waving the gun was his only reply. She frowned, but did as she was told. 

The shocks on the SUV were excellent; he barely felt the difference from transferring from the road to the sand, and he pointed her in the right direction, towards the rocks. He directed her around the nearest ridge, and there, parked in the shadow of the rock, was a pale blue Taurus. 

As she stopped the truck, she gazed at the car with shock, and said, "This was planned, wasn't it?" 

"Of course. Do you think this was slapdash?" 

She looked at him with a newfound respect; apparently she didn't think he really was working with others until now. "Where's the bomb?" 

"Does it matter?" He leaned over and plucked the keys out of the ignition, putting them in the pocket of his jeans before getting out of the truck. Since she no longer could start the SUV, and there was nowhere to go, she got out   
and followed him as he walked to the Taurus. He already had the key for it in his opposite pocket. 

"What do you mean does it matter?" She repeated. "You stole it. Don't you care?" 

He turned to her, and gave her a big, phony smile. " No, I don't care, Skipper. Haven't you figured it out yet?" 

Her expression seemed to fall, then resolve itself into something stony and grim, something that aged her incredibly. "It was never about the bomb," she said in a small, quiet voice. 

He nodded. "It was never about the bomb." 

He walked up to the passenger side of the Taurus, but she lagged behind, honestly stunned. "Who are you working for? NSA? Mossad? FSB? Some kind of splinter group?" 

"Already told ya, sweetie, we ain't discussing me." He didn't even know what FSB was, but he wasn't about to ask. He tossed her the key."Get in." 

"Why do I have to drive?" She asked petulantly, placing her hands on her hips in a universal gesture of defiance. 

"Up front or in the trunk," he replied. And he meant it too. 

She must have understood that, because, in spite of the constant death stare, she did as she was told. 

In spite of being parked in the shade, the car was as hot as the inside of a broiler, and as soon as she started it Stan turned on the air conditioner. It would take a minute or two to start putting out cool air, but some was better than none. 

It started fine, but why not - it had only been sitting idle a single night. 

Ginger got the car started easily, but as soon as they got back on the road, he told her, "No honey, turn it around." 

"What?" 

"Back the way we came, towards the trailer." 

She was going to fight him on this. He could see it in the set of her jaw, the suspicious narrowing of her eyes. "Why?" 

"Didn't Gabriel give you that whole misdirection lecture?" He waved the gun at her until she did a wide u - turn and headed back. "Besides, you want the bomb, right?" 

That made her look at him sharply. "You didn't have it, Stanley. We searched that trash heap you called a home." 

"Not there, no. But I know where it is. Isn't that all you care about?" 

For a moment she just stared at him, hands firmly on the wheel but eyes off the road, although it didn't matter since they were the only car to be seen. Finally she looked back out at the road with an impatient sigh. "Okay, so you did this to get to Gabriel. Don't you get it, Stan? You've been used again, duped. They get the bomb, and you get stuck with Gabriel, who's going to kill you. You have no idea how pissed off you've made him." 

"Oh, I think the hit squad was a clue, Skipper. But you're thinking that old Gabe is actually going to win this time." 

"You can't. I don't care who you're teamed with." 

"Oh yes I can. Don't you watch movies, Gilligan? The bad guy only seems to win for a while, but then the good guy rallies in the third act and saves the day." 

"Real life is not a movie." 

"Tell me about it. In real life, the bad guys often win. But since I'm one of them now, I feel I'm on equal footing, don't you?" 

The look she gave him was sarcastic, verging on derisive. "Stealing one lousy weapon prototype doesn't make you a bad guy, Stanley. It just makes you ..." 

She seemed reluctant to finish her thought, but he knew, with startling clarity, exactly what she had intended to say. 

"Stupid?" 

She nodded, with the slightest of scoffs. "Yes, exactly." 

For some reason that made him laugh, a sort of humorless cackle that made Ginger avoid his eyes. She thought he was unstable, nuts? Good. Great. 

Maybe he was. He didn't know anymore, and right now he didn't care. 

They drove in silence, past the pillar of black smoke that marked the remains of the trailer and the Mustang, and the other SUV - and all the pantsless men - were gone. He wasn't surprised, nor was he shocked that they didn't immediately come after Ginger. They probably had a nice chat with Gabriel, who told them to wait and see where the GPS signal sent them. Of course it would send them into Death Valley after an abandon truck, but who would appreciate that slight of hand more than Gabriel? 

After he directed her to the road that would take them to the freeway, he asked, "Where is Gabriel now, Ginger?" 

She tensed, so much that she put a little extra pressure on the gas pedal. "Why do you want to know?" 

"Because I want to say hello. I saw this great Tarantino film on video the other week, and I'd love to discuss it with him. Where is he, Ging?" 

She stared straight at the road, never looking at him. "You'll tell your friends. You'll kill him." 

Not a question. "Oh, come on now. Are you telling me you'd give your life for his?" 

She swallowed hard. When it came down to it, he knew her answer would be no. Gabriel wouldn't even think twice before shoving her into the line of fire - psychopaths had no loyalty. "You're going to try and kill us both, Stan. Cut the shit." 

He loved the way she threw in 'try'. "No, Skipper, I'm not. I will if I have to, but my ultimate goal is far worse than that." 

Now she glanced at him, but only briefly. She stared straight ahead as she considered what he could mean. "You're gonna turn us over to your group, aren't you?" 

It was so much fun to make her squirm, keep her guessing. It was her turn to deal with this shit, and she was liking it even less than he had. But then again, he wasn't the sociopathic control freak with the mass murdering boyfriend. "People didn't only die at your hands, they suffered. Now it's payback. Karma's a bitch, ain't it?" 

"It won't work, Stanley." Ah, using his name again. Wasn't that in some sort of handbook on what to do in dealing with a criminal? Actually, he had no idea, but it sounded like some sort of psychological personalization ploy. He bet she knew all the ploys. "It can't. He knows people - " 

"He has more enemies than friends," he interrupted, knowing that for a fact. "If word gets out he's been caught, there'll be a bidding war for him." 

Ginger fell silent. How did you respond to the truth? She was obviously trying to think of some way around this. There was no denying she was reasonably bright, but to team up with a psycho she must have been, overall, pretty damn dumb. 

Before she could say anything, he dropped his bombshell. "You don't have to suffer his fate." 

Bam. The quiet shock on her face was evident, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. It was obviously a very tempting offer. Who wanted to die, or worse yet, suffer at the hands of terrorists or foreign governments with a grudge? After a long moment, she said, "I know you're not going to let me go." A statement, not a question. 

"No, I'm not," he admitted. "But you can ultimately choose your own fate. Tell me where he is, and I'll hand you over to the feds: if you turn States, they'll probably go really easy on you. You don't have to worry about Gabe havin' you killed, as he will be very, very dead - or at least wishing he was - at that point." 

"And this is a good option?" She asked incredulously. 

"The other one is I turn you over to the Mossad, and let them get the information out of you." 

"The Mossad?" She was so shocked she almost swerved into a BMW in the oncoming lane. "Holy shit, you're working for them?" 

He sighed and rolled his eyes, as if disappointed that he let the cat out of the bag. "They got me shortly after I supposedly killed Gabe. They knew one of theirs was not behind this, and they thought I had worked with Gabe - or whatever the hell his name really is - and they wanted to know where he was. They weren't pleasant about it. Eventually they grew convinced I got sucked into this, and then asked me if I might ever be interested in participating in a 'sting' to get even with him. I said no ... at first." 

"And then Holly died," Ginger said quietly, finishing the story herself. 

He nodded. "Let me tell you, Ging - they have a real hard on for you and your boyfriend. All I have to do is give my handler the code word, and an army of commandos will be crawling up your ass in two minutes flat." 

The Mossad were not an enemy you wanted to have. The Israeli Secret Police may have belonged to an allied government, but it was well known they generally played by their own rules, and Washington pretended not to notice. They were ruthless, efficient, and had perfected the art of torture, having practiced it on Palestinians ( and sometimes their own people ) for years. They could kill you from a distance with a car bomb or a rigged cell phone; they could kill you quietly with poison; they could make a show of it and send dozens of body armored, automatic weapon wielding commandos crashing straight into your living room. It all depended on circumstances, and who was leading the charge. Ultimately, the Mossad could be the worst hands for Gabriel to fall into, because he had killed and framed one of their agents - a rogue one, but still theirs - and they could make him instantly disappear off the face of the earth, thrown into a pit that would make the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' look like a trip to the day spa.  
And he was gambling that Ginger knew that as much as Gabriel did. 

"So why haven't you?" She asked, with some reluctance. Maybe she was afraid of giving him ideas. 

"Because as much as I hate you - and believe me, dollface, I do - I know I no longer matter to them. You were right: they did use me. I was better than all their computer geeks, and they knew it. They wanted me on board so I could get Peacemeal for them as much as bring in Gabriel. And when I give the word, I'll get no joy out of this - they'll spirit Gabriel away, and I will never get to see him suffer like he deserves. At most, all I'll get is a slap on the back and a suitcase full of blood money. It's not enough." 

"You can't get Gabriel on your own." 

"I know, but maybe I can try. And look at it this way: your boyfriend has a better chance to survive if I go in alone. If I instantly hand him over to the Mossad, he doesn't have a chance in hell." He paused before adding the kicker: "And neither do you." 

He just let that sink in for a moment, then asked, "So where is he, Skipper?" 

She thought about it, and then said, "There's a third option." 

"Yes. I kill you." 

"No. We go to the airport. I buy a ticket on the next plane out - I don't care where to - and before I board the plane I'll tell you where he is. Then I'm the hell out of there, and so are you, and we're all happy." 

"You can call him from the plane." 

She made a noise of angry frustration. "Fine, I'll catch a charter. They generally don't have phones." 

"Do you have a private charter on standby at LAX? Is that why you want to go?" 

She made the noise again. "No! Look, you want Gabriel? Fine, okay, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison. If anyone can understand that, Stan, it's you." 

He pretended to consider that, glancing out at the cars passing by them. He saw one woman who was either talking to herself or singing along with the radio, a man drinking coffee at the wheel of his SUV, another man who looked to be shouting into his cell phone and also looking for something on the passenger seat as he tried to drive. All these people probably led normal lives, that never had anything to do with terrorists or bank robberies or weapon prototypes that could knock a modern city back into the Stone Age. Most of these people probably hadn't ever seen a dead body, nonetheless the murdered bodies of people they knew, or seen someone blown up right in front of them. He envied them their blissful ignorance. 

"Take the next exit," he said, feeling weary, his head starting to ache again. 

"What?" 

"You heard me. Do it." 

"What about - " 

"I'm thinking," he snapped, kneeing open the glove compartment. Inside there was a travel pack of Kleenex near the 'emergency road kit' and he ripped open the pack and held a wad of tissues against the back of his head, where he had been previously pistol whipped. He had some glass cuts that were starting to hurt too, but nothing like his head. He pulled the wad of tissue away to see how bad it was. 

It was bloody, but not sodden, so he had to assume that was a good sign. No brain bits, or fragments of skin or scalp either. 

"You think your head hurts," Ginger grumbled. "You got any aspirin or something?" 

"I pulled the punch on you. Your goon didn't with me." He gave her a sidelong glance. She did have a dark spot on her forehead, which was probably a bruise from his mild hit with the gun butt, but her thug had full out walloped him. He was lucky he didn't lose consciousness, and would be lucky if he didn't have a concussion. 

He had planned for the possibility that he might be injured seriously enough that he couldn't quite keep going. He had with him, hidden in a pocket in his boxer shorts ( it was made for a condom, but hey, he wasn't planning on getting laid today ), some pure grade speed, a type he had done once or twice in college to successfully pull all nighters. It kept him up, it kept his brain sharp, and there was no pesky drug high to interfere with his concentration. It was just a pure adrenaline bullet train ride ... for about ten hours, and then the crash was spectacular, which is why he had only done it twice, when he knew slamming caffeine and sugar wouldn't be enough. No matter the injury, it would keep him almost oblivious to pain, and firing on all cylinders. It also might trigger a heart attack, and severe bleeding due to its anti - coagulant effects, but those were risks he was willing to take. 

"Here's the deal," he said, pressing the tissues back against the wound. Pressure hurt, but not in a way he couldn't handle. "There's a safe house a few miles from here, and I use that term loosely, because it's really just the frame of a house - nothing else there, no telephone, no electricity, and no one around. I take you there and drop you off, and you tell me where Gabriel is. I leave you there, and you do whatever the hell you want. You lie to me, you get to a phone and warn Gabriel, my Mossad friends will hunt you down within three days." 

"How is that better than dropping me off at the airport?" 

"Because it will take you at least an hour to walk out to civilization, especially on those heels. Things should be well under way by then." 

She thought about it. "How will you explain that to your Mossad buddies?" 

"I killed you and took care of the body myself. As long as you're contained somehow, they won't care." 

"I still don't see why the airport -" 

"You're tryin' my patience, sweetheart. Truth is, I may not need you - they may have found him already. And prison wouldn't be that bad for a tough chick like you, would it? There's no fear of anal rape at least, unless Large Marge manages to smuggle a long handled wooden spoon out of the kitchen ..." 

"That's really classy, Stanley." 

"Take a right here," he instructed, as the freeway exit gave way to a grid of small town streets. It wasn't even a decent town, just sort of a speed bump, a way station on the route to more important locations. "I know I was an idiot when you and Gabe found me, but I'm not completely naive. I did time in Leavenworth; I can lecture you on the base ugliness of some elements of humanity." 

"So that's why you're contracting for the Mossad now?" 

"No. I did that so I could nail you two. I wouldn't remind me if I were you." 

They were silent for the next few miles, as run down stores and tumble down houses gave way to miles of barren scrub and rolling yellow hills that might as well have been part of Death Valley, or even some part of a lunar landscape. After three more miles, she asked, "You weren't kidding about it being outside civilization, were you?"  
"Nope." 

Eventually the road smoothed out, a recently paved stretch leading to what looked like a small cluster of pressed wood A- frames, the skeletal braces of pre - fab suburban homes yet to be. "What is this place?" Ginger asked. 

"It was supposed to be a brand new housing project that would 'reclaim' the desert as well as servicing the 'white flight' from the surrounding towns. But there were problems securing water rights from the biggest utility in the area, and then one of the business partners in this venture accused the other of embezzling funds, and the whole thing exploded into a huge mess all over the front pages of the financial report. The partners are now suing the snot out of each other, the stockholders are suing them, and this place has been in litigation hell for over a year. No one comes here, and most likely they'll just tear down what's here and sell the land to recoup their losses." 

"So we can add trespassing to our list of offenses," Ginger said wryly, as she drove up the road that would have been  the main route through Buena Sierra Estates. To prove how doomed the project was, the road ended abruptly a quarter mile ahead, exposing nothing but more hard packed sand. 

"Second house on the end," he said, pointing to the right. 

She brought the car to a stop in the middle of the truncated road, parallel to the A frame. Well, there was no traffic to worry about. Stan used the gun to motion she should get out, and with a scowl, she did. He grabbed the key from her before getting out himself. 

"Great place to dump a body," she said, shading her eyes as she glanced around. 

"Yep, sure is," he agreed. He crossed his arms over his chest, still keeping a tight grip of the gun, and said, "Location, Ginger." 

"What's my guarantee that you won't shoot me afterwards?" 

"What's my guarantee that you won't lie and buy some time to save your ass and that of your boyfriend? It looks like our mistrust is gonna have to meet in the middle, or one of us is gonna end up dead, if not both of us." 

She stood in a defiant posture once more, arms crossed and shoulders thrown back, acting as if she was trying to stare him into submission. He simply leaned back against the car and returned her look, unfazed and uncaring.  
After a moment, she huffed a sigh through her nose, and said, "There's a private dock near Santa Monica. He's staying there, on the boat." 

"What's the name of the boat?" 

She hesitated, as if not willing to say, or trying to make up something good. "Freedom." 

He rolled his eyes. "Well, of course. I should have guessed that, shouldn't I?" 

She shrugged one shoulder, feigning a disinterested look. "You tell me, Stan. Can I go now?" 

"Not yet. I want to see if it's on the suspect list." 

Now she looked genuinely concerned. "Huh?" 

"Into the house. You'll see." 

She wasn't about to move, but gun gesturing got her going. 

He hated calling it a house when it was just the outer walls of one: there was no door, no windows, no upper story, and no roof. It was a shell of a house that would never be completed. 

Inside it smelled faintly of sawdust and plastic, and the sand was so hard packed it seemed like a floor ( the truth was the floor was never put in ). Debris was piled in two corners of the pseudo home, tangles of wires and cables too heavy for anyone to steal, rolls of insulation no one would bother to steal, and assorted broken wooden panel and aluminum tubing. 

Ginger paused in the middle of the floor, a ray of sun catching her like a spotlight, and gestured around like a frustrated game show host. "There's nothing here." 

"Yes there is. It's hidden." He walked over to the corner where the wires were tangled up with rolls of insulation, and said, "Move and I shoot you in the leg." 

"Where do I have to go?" She replied peevishly. But she stood there, arms folded over her chest,and watched as he kicked some of the debris aside. 

Under it all, hidden by deliberate scuffs and dirt, was a large, flat metal case, chained down to the frame of the house. Stan peeled the plastic cover off the small digital lock pad and entered the numeral code that released the internal locks with a clank. Ginger shifted position, but carefully, only leaning forward to see what he had. 

Inside the case was a matching Ashton Digital Passport laptop ( matching in every way, including software ), a cell phone, and a silver metal suitcase with its own locking mechanism. As he put the laptop and cell phone aside, he hefted the metal suitcase out, and she gaped at it, wide eyed and gobsmacked. 

"Is that Peacemeal?" She gasped, almost walking towards it, but thinking better of it. 

"Yep. I haven't delivered the goods yet. As I said, once they get this, they don't need me anymore." 

She stared at him like he was a complete loon. "You can't be thinking of fucking around with the Mossad." 

He nonchalantly shrugged a single shoulder. "My world, my rules." 

The look on her face seemed to suggest she thought he wasn't a loon more than a complete raving psychopath, but then her expression began to inexorably shift. Wide eyes narrowed in suspicious, but her mouth remained open in shock, and she finally came to the conclusion he wanted her to. "You aren't working with anyone, are you Stan? You did plan this all by yourself." 

"Who? Me? Oh, come on Skipper - you know I ain't smart enough." But he grinned fiercely at her, enjoying the shock and disbelief sinking in, all of it visible on her face. 

Now she was convinced he needed Thorazine. "Stan, listen to me. That's a very dangerous weapon, and Gabriel is more dangerous than you realize. He - " 

He stalked right up to her, and he enjoyed the fear that made her take a step back. "Guess what, honey? I'm more dangerous than you realize." 

He punched her right across the jaw, hand wrapped around the butt of his gun for just that much more added force on the hit. Like he expected, she went down like a bag of hammers, a cloud of sand kicking up on her impact with the ground. As soon as he was sure she was unconscious, he went to the opposite corner and dug out the roll of duct tape. 

Duct tape was a much better binder than rope, if used correctly. It stuck to every goddamn thing and just didn't want to let go - that's why it was so valuable in home repairs. 

He taped her wrists together first, behind her back, and then taped her ankles together. After that was done he bent her legs back, and then used duct tape to bind her ankles and wrists together - hogtied. That was an almost impossible position to get out, especially when tape was involved. He made sure her head was turned to the side since she was down on her belly - he didn't want her to suffocate - and then threw what was left of the roll of the tape back into the debris pile. It had done what it was supposed to do. 

And now it was time to get down to some real work. 

The Ashton Digital Passport was the same, right down to the daemon running in the background. As soon as he input the code to disable it, he called up the files he needed, attached the filter to the cell phone, and started punching up the first number. 

There were 'independent' Mossad operatives functioning in the U.S., after Palestinian terrorists and their financial backers, wanted back in Israel. They were generally kidnapped and snuggled out of the country, although the Mossad always denied this; they also denied any assassinations. 

Officially, the U.S. Government knew nothing of them, and did not sanction their actions. Unofficially, there was a small cadre of officers working with them on terrorist investigations. If you knew the right pages to hack, you could find encrypted data all about it in N.S.A. files. And if you could decrypt the data, you could get a lot of things - such as phone numbers, operation code words, locations. 

After three rings, the phone on the other end was picked up. "Hello?" A faintly accented male voice replied, almost covering the tiny click of a recording device. 

Stan activated the voice filter, so his voice would be mechanically distorted. Perfectly audible, but so fucked up they'd never even be able to discern if the caller was a man or a woman, even if they put it through other computer filters. The equipment was out there, if you had the money to pay for it. Stan did. "Tzedaka," he said, his voice mechanically deepened.  It was a Yiddish word that meant, basically, righteousness, and was the code name for an operation in place. 

The man must have switched to a more secure line, because there was another click, and then he said, "Mr. White is not here." According to the file Stan had displayed on his laptop right now, that was the appropriate code phrase. Now he had one more to say. He thought all that shit in spy movies was made up, but apparently they did occasionally speak in code. "Take a message for Mr. Black." 

Another click. "Who is this about?" 

"Serpent." It was their code name for the man who called himself Gabriel Shear, but wasn't. It was an appropriate name. "He's in country, at a private dock in Santa Monica, on a personal yacht - " Stan was guessing there. " - named Freedom. He will be leaving soon - time is of the essence. Also, we have an agent in play: six foot three, two hundred pounds, blond, wearing a black leather jacket with yellow accents - he'll be a civilian in a sea of suits. We'd appreciate if he is not collateral damage. Confirm." 

"Confirmed." 


	6. Part 6

"Black out." He cut the connection, and knew if they tried to trace the call's location, they'd get nothing but a string of seemingly random numbers that was really a code for a government satellite - it would seemingly confirm that they were talking to another government entity. He switched frequencies and altered the voice synthesizer as well, before placing a call to a number he never really wanted to ever punch up again. 

The phone rang twice before it was answered. "Agent Roberts," the man answered with clipped professionalism. 

"Do not hang up the phone, Agent Roberts - this is not a prank," he said, aware he probably would. 

Stan was sure he heard a chair creak in the background. "Who is this?" 

"A friend. If you wish to collect the fugitive known as Ginger Knowles and the stolen prototype named Peacemeal, come to Buena Sierra Estates in Casa Rojas, California right now." 

There was a long pause. "Did you say Peacemeal?" 

"Don't bother trying to trace this call - this phone has been phreaked." 'Phreaking' was usually the first thing a budding hacker ever managed to do. All you had to do was intercept the radio frequency of a cell phone ( or, back in the olden days, figure out the right 'tones' of a land line telephone ), and then you could make phone calls on someone else's dime. Although land lines could be traceable to a location if not you specifically, phreaking a cell phone would give you that cell phone frequency's point of origin - the frequency, not the phone you were actually on. A beautiful set up. Stan first phreaked a land line - the pay phone outside the 7 - 11 - when he was eleven years old. 

"Wait a minute," Roberts said, obviously stalling for time. That was in the F.B.I. handbook. "Why would you give us Peacemeal? What does Knowles have to do with it?" 

"Get a move on before she escapes and takes it with her." 

There was a pause, and then Roberts said, "Jobson, is this you? Stanl - " 

But Stan had hung up, figuring he got the message across. 

He shut down the laptop and took it and the phone outside, back to the car. He popped the trunk and pulled out the black leather jacket with the bright yellow accents on the arm and on the hem in the front and back. But it was hot from being in the car trunk all this time, so he didn't put it on, just carried it up front, tossing it in the passenger seat with the laptop, gun, and phone. Maybe exposure to the air conditioner would cool it down to a wearable temperature by the time he reached Santa Monica. 

The miles passed in a blur of grey roads and strip mall scenery. At some point, when the throbbing of his head made the sunlight especially brutal, he remembered the speed in his pocket and went for it. He bet he looked like a right pervert digging inside his own pants, but hey, at least the windows were tinted dark. 

He dry swallowed the pill, and knew it was starting to work when the ache began to wane, his heart began to race, and he started to see pinpricks of light burst and fade before his eyes. He felt good, his body humming like a live wire, his mind crackling with energy. If the crash wasn't so bad, he could easily see how he could have become addicted to this stuff. 

He entered the Santa Monica city limits singing along to "Fascination Street", an old Cure song that reminded him of college. He remembered getting really drunk to that song at a party where he was invited along as a pity case by a girl who felt sorry for the big geek, but liked the fact that he had helped her with her advanced calculus paper. He wondered what happened to her, and if her life had taken a third of the weird turns his had. 

He pulled over into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen and retrieved his laptop from the passenger seat, keeping the car running for the air conditioning. "Put on your face, put on your fear, and let's hit opening time down on fascination street," he sang, booting up. Oh man, he was flying. The idea of it made him laugh. 

That confirmed he was high.  
He searched the net for all the docks - private ones in Santa Monica, through city records. Private or not, they would be listed. Admittedly, only a few people could access those records legally, but fuck, he was a hacker - nothing was off limits to him. He also opened a window to the even more off limits criminal database, so he could cross reference. 

There were more private docks than he thought, but he was able to cross several off the list, as the men ( and they were all men ) were on the criminal database - drug dealers most likely. But as he began to go through the remaining names on the list, something nagged at the back of his mind. Santa Monica ... what was it about Santa Monica that sounded familiar? 

He had about a half dozen windows open now, and he was typing fast enough that his fingers seemed like a blur even to him - his brain was moving a million miles an hour, and his body was trying its damnedest to catch up. 

He called up the online archives of the L.A. Times, and found the article he was looking for, page three, summer of last year : Escort Found Murdered, with the smaller under headline addendum, Dumped Off Santa Monica Pier.  
Helga. Where Helga's body was fished out of the water almost a year ago. 

They were referring to a public pier, but according to the records he had, the closest privately owned pier was just two and a half miles South of it, owned by a bogus sounding corporation called Heiwa Consolidated. 

According to an online translation program, 'heiwa' was the Japanese word for peace. Oh yeah, this was Gabriel all right. He couldn't help but laugh - he'd found the bastard. And, poetically, he had probably returned to the scene of the crime. 

He downloaded a map of the most direct route from here to there, and drove off, feeling a sort of pure elation he'd never felt before. It was almost over; all the pieces had nearly fallen into place. 

The urge to speed - to catch up to his racing mind - was overwhelming, but he didn't need to be caught by the cops right now. Although it would be ironic. 

"Driving faster in my car, falling farther from just what we are," he sang along with the Stone Temple Pilots on the  radio, as he turned down the main street heading for the Heiwa pier. "Smoke a cigarette and lie some more, these conversations kill ..." 

He brought the car to a halting stop beside a shut down factory, an old fish processing plant judging by the smell. He shut down his laptop and took out a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment, and shoved them in the pocket of his leather jacket. Grabbing up the jacket and Ginger's gun, he got out of the car, shrugged the coat on, and started stalking down the alley, headed towards Gabriel's pier. 

He was far enough out that he could peer around the corner of some crumbling brick building - crouching low, so he wasn't at an obvious angle - and glanced around with the binoculars. 

Although it was still the afternoon, here the sky was overcast and leaden with the promise of rain,making it as dim as dusk. It seemed appropriate somehow. There was a boat at the end of the pier, a yacht, but very small and almost demure, as if the owner really didn't want anything large or ostentatious enough to draw attention to himself. And that would make sense, would it not? Stan saw tiny black letters spelling out 'Freedom' on the bow. 

He searched for armed guards but didn't see anything, making him wonder if this was a set up, or Gabe was really into keeping a low profile, when he saw a pinprick glow of a red flare in the darkness around the dock - a cigarette. Not too stealthy there, but they probably weren't expecting company. 

He pocketed the binoculars again, and as soon as he got to his feet, he shoved Ginger's gun in the waistband of his jeans, near his hip. There was no way he was shoving it down the front, near the 'family jewels' - he had no idea how any man ever did that. 

He started walking down towards the pier, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, wondering when the Mossad guys would get here, or if they were here already. They wouldn't hit like a hurricane; they were pros, and they would pick their moment. 

He was about ten feet from the pier when he heard the click of guns being cocked, and shadows seemed to surge  
from the overwhelming darkness cloaking the docks. He smelled bad aftershave, cordite, and tobacco over saline and fish guts as he was surrounded by a half dozen Eurotrash thugs brandishing TEC - 9's and Uzis. 

Stan raised his empty hands, and said, "I'm happy to see you guys too, but can you put down the boom sticks? I come in peace." 

He didn't recognize any of these guys, but that didn't mean they hadn't been on Gabriel's crew before. Thugs blurred generically into on greasy haired, thick necked organism. 

One big guy with slicked back blonde hair and a brown Armani suit that fit him like a sausage casing frisked him violently. "What, you're not gonna buy me dinner first?" Stan asked, amused. Almost instantly the goon found Ginger's gun, and scowled at him like he was being a brat. "It's a bad neighborhood," he pointed out. Just like the thug back at the trailer, he didn't manage to find the gun in his boot. Idiots. 

Before anyone could move to pistol whip him again ( they really did like to do that ), he heard the cocking of another gun, and a familiar voice say, "Where the fuck is it, Stanley?" 

Standing on the dock, aiming a shiny new Glock at him, was Gabriel - looking like complete shit. He was about thirty pounds heavier than when he last saw him, clean shaven, crew cut hair dyed a florescent blond that wasn't flattering on anyone. He didn't look fat so much as bloated, like a corpse that had finally washed ashore after several weeks in the sea. "Whoa!" Stan replied, chuckling. "Somebody's been hitting the Ho - Ho's big time." 

Gabriel continued to glare at him, perpetually unamused. Did the man ever smile - aside from when other people we getting hurt? "You have five seconds to tell me, Stan." 

He shrugged and let his hands fall to his sides, never looking away from Gabriel's steel hard grey eyes. "The info dies with me, Gabe. Go ahead and pull the trigger." 

Gabriel searched his face, but Stan wasn't bluffing, and he seemed to figure that out. He lowered the gun, looking as sour and mean as a rabid wolf cheated of its prey, and snapped, "Where's Ginger?" 

Now he asks. It was nice to see his priorities were in order.  "With Peacemeal. And if you want them both, I suggest we talk." 

"He was carrying this," the blond thug said, tossing Gabriel Ginger's gun. 

He caught it in one hand and must have recognized it, as his scowl deepened, seemingly collapsing into the folds of his face. He tucked it into his white pants ( not a good choice for a chunky guy ), and motioned with a sharp jerk of his head that Stan should follow him back to the boat. The thugs reluctantly moved aside to let him pass, giving him several varieties of dirty looks. Stan just gave them a cheesy, insincere smile as he walked past them, up onto the dock. 

The sea was placid and dark as metal, reflecting the hazy disc of the cloud obscured sun like a low beam headlight seen through a dirty windshield, and he wondered idly how deep the water was here. Deep enough to hide a body for a while? Sink a small ship? 

Without looking back, Gabriel ducked inside the cabin of the yacht, and as soon as he stepped on the deck Stan followed, remarkably relaxed considering he was on high grade amphetamines and knew very well that he could die any second - if Gabriel didn't go psycho on him, there was always the chance the Mossad could accidentally take him out, assuming they showed up in time. But he was the man holding the cards, and he felt like he had nothing to lose anymore. 

Either way, he was confident Gabriel was going to die here today. 

As soon as he ducked down into the yacht's cabin, he felt like he had slipped through a rip in space and entered a dentist's waiting room. A beige on clay color scheme was the motif of the cabin, and it seemed austere for such a small space, with nothing but a sofa and a couple of tables seemingly secured to the floor, and a built in large screen t.v. in the opposite wall. An open archway led to the kitchen/ 'mess' area, and that's where Gabriel was, sitting at a chair facing the rest of the cabin, gun aimed across the table at him. "What's the game here, Stan? I know you won't give me Peacemeal for any price. Think you're gonna kill me?" 

Stan smiled weakly at him. "Are you asking me to?" 

Gabriel didn't even crack a smile. No sense of humor. "I know you're trying to fuck me, Stan. It won't work." 

"Trust me, I have no desire to fuck you. What I want is answers." 

Gabriel considered that, while Stan remained standing in the center of the cabin. Time was his to waste. "To what?" He finally asked. 

"Why me?" 

Gabriel looked uncomprehending, so he continued. "You wanted Phamous - Torvald - but then when he was caught, you went to plan B. Why was I plan B? Out of all the hackers out there, why us? Why me?" 

For a moment, he didn't think he would answer. But Gabriel said, without emotion and irony, "Torvald wanted in. He was in it for the cash. Of all the others I considered, you were the one with the most to lose." 

Stan wished he was surprised, but he wasn't. "So I was the easiest to manipulate." 

"Bingo." 

Stan shook his head. "I figured as much." He gestured to the television. "You got a satellite dish?" 

"I could have you tortured, Stan. I could cuff a chain to your ankles and drop you overboard. So why aren't you scared?" He asked, and laid his hand ( and gun ) on the table. 

"Because we're all gonna die, Gabe. You wanted Peacemeal, you got it." 

"Meaning?" No emotion. He probably didn't have any. 

Stan gave him a sickly smile, and this situation seemed so anti - climatic he had the urge to laugh. "Meaning I lied. I knocked her out, tied her up, and dumped her out in the desert. I brought Peacemeal with me, and that baby's ready to go." 

Gabriel was silent for a long moment, studying Stan like something he'd just scraped off the bottom of his shoe.   
"You're lying." Not a shout or a question, just a statement of fact. 

"Have your goons look in my car. Carefully." 

"You wouldn't kill yourself, Stan," he said, again very matter of factly. "You're not the type." 

"Oh, I'm not? Even if my death would guarantee the death of a monster like you?" 

Gabriel shook his head, and was starting to look smug. "No. You have too much to live for. You'd find another way." 

"What if I couldn't?" 

He stood up suddenly, raising the gun once again. "You're stalling for time. Are the Feds on their way? Do you really think they could catch me?" 

"No. Don't the Feds still think you're dead?" 

Gabriel shrugged, walking around the table, gun still fixed on him. "I don't know. I don't care. Why the stall, Stan?" 

He glared at him. "You know everything. You tell me." 

Gabriel was not appeased. His lips thinned until they seemed to disappear completely into his fleshy face. "You have sixty seconds to tell me, or I shoot you in the leg." 

"What? Don't I at least get a blow job this time? I haven't had a good one in ages." 

Gabriel glanced at his watch. "Forty seconds." 

Stan calculated the distance between them: Gabriel was smart enough to be out of arm's reach, and he had no doubt he was a quick and accurate shot, but Stan felt completely wired and confident enough in his training that he was sure he could get to Gabriel after a single shot. Where that shot would go was the only question in his mind. He felt like he could move quickly, but he was on speed and knew that was probably distorting his own senses. Still, Gabriel was older, and a beached whale: he had gotten soft, at least physically, while Stan had been busy honing himself into a weapon. As long as there was no gun between them, Stan knew he had the edge. 

"There is a bomb about to go off. Not Peacemeal, but hey, I had a specific interest in getting that sucker off the market." 

Gabriel shook his head. "Twenty seconds." 

"Tell me, why the fat bastard look now? Does that work for you more than Eurotrash swine?" 

Gabriel gave him a hard glare for that, and he knew he had probably forced the bastard into shooting him early, when all hell broke loose outside. 

It was fiction that guns with silencers made no noise at all; of course they made noise. But it was muffled, the difference between popping a balloon next to your ear and popping it in another room. The sounds of the water lapping against the sides of the boat almost blocked it out, but not quite. Especially when someone standing on the deck over their heads hit it like a fallen bag of doorknobs. And the guys still capable of working their limbs on the dock were starting to shoot back. 

Stan knew Gabriel was going to shoot, so he moved fast, dodging to the side just at the moment his ears seemed to register the gun shot, and already aware of his position in relation to his, he blindly spun into a high kick. He felt himself make contact, and heard the gun as it hit the floor, but he didn't stop to look. He just kept moving, taking advantage of surprise. He followed through on the kick by spinning into what his aikido teacher called the 'comfort zone', the few feet people liked to keep away from other people. As soon as he was inside Gabriel's comfort zone, he threw a hard elbow into his puffy face, feeling bone crunch, and then buried his knee in his prodigious gut. 

Whatever air Gabriel had in his lungs left him in a whoosh, and he stumbled back, blood spurting from the shattered ruin of his nose, and Stan went for his dropped gun, on the floor beneath the big screen. 

"What can I say, Gabe - I lied like a rug," he admitted, aiming the nine millimeter Glock at Gabriel. "You're the only one who's going to die today." 

Gabriel straightened up, holding the back of his right hand to his bloody nose. Crimson drops were now splattered on his ill chosen white pants and pale blue shirt, and outside there were panicky shouts among the staccato coughs of bullets, and one exploded through the side of the boat and hit the couch with a quiet little pmmff, like someone had just dropped a throw pillow. Gabriel looked at him with eyes as cold and distant as always, disdainful in spite of the fact that he was looking down the barrel of his own gun. "It's still not going to work, Stan." 

"Oh really?" Stan was aware of a burning sensation in his right hip, a feeling of warmth crawling down his leg, and figured Gabriel had shot or at least nicked him, but he didn't bother to look. It didn't matter. 

"You're not going to kill me. You don't have it in you." 

Stan raised an eyebrow at him, amazed at the arrogance of this cold blooded man. "Oh, so that whole rocket launcher thing was a fluke?" 

"That's shooting an object. To look a person in the face and kill them is something else entirely, no matter how much you hate them. You couldn't do it, Stanley." Gabriel turned away, and started back towards the kitchen. Outside, both the shots and the shouts had been rapidly dwindling, and someone had started running across the deck, only to fall with a heavy thud before they reached the door of the cabin. The Mossad contractors were picking off Gabriel's crew like the amateur hour players they were. 

"Stop, Gabriel," he shouted, but Gabriel kept walking away. Stan took several steps towards him, and fired the gun. The bullet just went over his shoulder by a few inches, hitting a cabinet in the wall in front of him. 

Gabriel did finally stop, back stiffening, but he didn't turn around. "And after I let you and your little brat live." 

"For future use," he spat, trying to rein in his anger before it ran away with him.The moment he gave in to emotions was the moment he lost control of this situation. "You think I didn't figure that out? You let me live not only to make your death look good, but just in case you needed my skills again. I had the most to lose, right?" 

For a moment they listened to the dying spit of bullets outside, the apocalypse moving from a cacophony to a whisper of wind through dead men's bones. "I knew you were smarter than you looked," Gabriel finally said. "Then again, you'd have to be, wouldn't you?"He started walking forward again. 

"I told you to stop," he shouted, as Gabriel continued to ignore him. 

Gabriel was opening a drawer, and Stan knew he was going for a weapon. The fucking bastard. Stan aimed and fired, and his right shoulder exploded into a red mist of blood and bone fragments. Gabriel sagged forward against the sink, in shock as much as pain, but after a moment he reached for the drawer again. 

Stan knew he was going for a weapon. The stupid son of a bitch - he really didn't think he would shoot to kill. "Stop," he shouted, but Gabriel didn't, so Stan pulled the trigger once more. 

Blood seemed to explode all over the kitchen wall as Gabriel jerked and collapsed, first against the sink, then he sunk straight down to the floor. The bullet had punched through his throat, and taken out about half of it. He ended up laying on his back, his head propped up against a low cabinet, staring at him with glazed eyes as blood spewed from the hole where the right side of his neck used to be. 

Just like water it poured, spreading over the white vinyl tiled floor, and Stan approached him slowly, feeling slightly disconnected, as if in a dream. Gabriel's lips were moving, and he wasn't sure if he was struggling to speak or just trying to breathe. He could see the muscles twitching, flashes of white bone underneath, and Stan felt his gorge rise in his throat, bile burning his esophagus, but he managed to swallow it back. At least for now. "You were wrong, Gabriel," he told him, his hands feeling cold. "How does that feel?" 

The pool of blood was spreading out like a lake now, and Gabriel's lips moved once more, and he took a breath, obviously preparing to speak. And then he stopped; he just stopped. The breath hissed out of him like a leak in a pressure hose, and he sagged, head lolling on the less supported side, the cascade of blood slowing to a trickle down his ruined arm. 

He had fantasized about killing this man for what seemed ages, and now that he had, he felt no satisfaction, nothing like he thought he would feel. He just felt numb and vaguely ill. 

Stan didn't want to step in the blood, but he had to see what was in that drawer, which was half open. Along with the blood, there was an assortment of kitchen tools, knives, spatulas .. and what looked a metal box about the size and shape of a t.v. remote, although it only had two buttons on it. 

A remote detonator. The ship was probably wired to blow, or maybe the entire pier. If he was going to die, he was going to take them all with him, and get rid of the evidence at the same time. 

Stan turned, trying not to slip on the gore, and he heard the thunder of boots on the deck over his head, and saw the figures filling the stairway, racing down into the cabin, Uzis and Kalashnikovs held out and ready. He raised his hands over his head, gun held loosely but aimed away from them, and shouted, "Tzedaka!" 

The group of seven armed men paused just inside the cabin, and Stan didn't know which of them was the leader. They were all dressed in black, right up to the ski masks pulled over their faces. They looked like stereotypical commandos, but he knew these men had just wiped out whatever goons Gabriel had protecting him - maybe they were typical in wardrobe choice, but they had just taken out some expensive mercenaries in no time flat. 

Sure he had a momentary reprieve from getting shot, he quickly said, "He went for a remote detonator after I disarmed him. I had to take him down." 

"You knew we were coming?" The closest man on his far left said, his voice betraying a hint of an Israeli accent. 

Stan nodded. "The Assistant Director gave me the head's up so I wouldn't pick the wrong side when the shooting started. Can I lower my hands here?" 

The man thought about it a moment before giving him an approving nod, but Stan continued to move slowly, so no one got too nervous. "I take it the mission was successful?" 

"The action was completed as planned," the leader replied, as blandly as if he was ordering a salad. And none of this did mean anything to him - he was a professional, and this was just a job. 

Stan nodded like he understood, and pulled his shirt out of his pants, using it to wipe the gun clean of his prints and hold it as he carried it back towards Gabriel. It was hard to avoid the blood, but he managed to get close enough to press the gun into Gabriel's tepid, dead hand. 

"You've been hit," the commando leader noted dispassionately. "Do you require assistance?" 

They weren't offering medical attention, just help out of here. He would have laughed if he wasn't about a minute away from throwing up his lunch. He glanced briefly at Gabriel's slack, dead face, his eyes half lidded and cloudy, and Stan thought he was the most pathetic looking monster he had ever seen. 

He turned away, and told the commandos, "No, I'm good. It's just a flesh wound." Of course he didn't know if it was or wasn't, but he was just going to assume that until the speed wore off. 

He walked past them cautiously, hearing two speak quiet, rapid fire Hebrew, and he knew they might be debating whether to kill him anyways, if only because he was a witness. But he walked slowly up the stairs, braced for a bullet, but it never came. There were two more commandos on the deck, looking out for any further attacks from the water or the pier, but so far it was all eerily quiet. He gave them an acknowledging nod and didn't even glance at the bodies he had to step over, although he thought he recognized the guy with half a head as the thug who frisked him earlier. Even in death, his suit still didn't fit right. 

Stan managed to reach the alley leading to his car before he leaned over and barfed up whatever he had in his stomach. Not a lot, but more than he thought, and the bile burned like acid in his throat. He was unable to spit out the taste, so he figured he'd have to stop somewhere and get something strong enough to rinse the vomit out of his mouth. 

He got back to his car and sat in it for a long time, doing nothing but staring at the wall in front of him. It was over. It was well and truly over. 

So why didn't he feel any better? 

____________________________ 

Seattle, Washington - Two days later  
____________________________ 

    "I don't suppose you have a moment, do you Stan?" 

It sounded like a polite question, but he knew it was anything but: it was an order, made in the nicest way possible under the circumstances. 

Stan paid for his mocha latte without glancing over his shoulder, although he did say to the man behind him, "Sure, just a sec." The extremely pierced young woman working the register gave him his change with a bored, "Are you still here?" sort of air, and then Stan picked up his coffee and turned to see Agent Roberts standing by a window table. Impatience was etched into every line on his dark face, but it was also tempered with a certain weariness, as if he expected no less from him. 

He was dressed too nice for this particular Starbucks. Although it was usually the gathering place of lawyers and account executives worldwide, this was in University Place, an area best known for cross dressers, skate punks, pseudo - bohemians , and where former grunge rockers came to overdose. Stan knew he blended in with his jeans and leather jacket, but Roberts, in his natty off the rack grey suit, looked like the Fed he was. A young couple at a near by table got up and left, and Stan wondered if it was coincidence. 

"I didn't think this was your beat," he said, taking the seat facing the door. 

Roberts sat down in the opposite seat, sighing as if already tired of him. "You know it's not." 

"So what brings you here? Should I get a lawyer?" 

Roberts raised an eyebrow at him. "Should you?" 

Because he turned evidence on the whole Gabriel/ Swordfish mess, he got immunity from prosecution, at least as far as that went. Still, he knew better than to trust a deal made with Feds, especially after all he had done. "Are you in town for the Justice Department's press conference about the Microsoft verdict?" 

Robert's dark brown eyes studied him coolly, like he knew he was yanking his chain but just couldn't prove it yet. "Three days ago, we arrested Ginger Knowles." 

Stan looked at him as if surprised. "No shit? Where?" 

"I think you know." 

Stan just stared at him. "How would I know?" 

"She said you beat her up and trussed her like a turkey. She also said you stole Peacemeal from a secret and secured facility." 

Stan continued to look at him blankly over the fragrant steam rising from his coffee cup. He had discovered he was a natural, facile liar, and was sorry he hadn't realized that when it could have done him more good. "What the hell is Peacemeal?" 

Roberts scowled at him, brows dropping low over his eyes. "Is that the way you're gonna play this, Stanley?" 

He returned the scowl. "I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. " 

"Uh huh." He didn't believe that for a second, but again, he needed proof. Roberts went on, but with a flat, slightly derisive tone, as if Stan was making him say this just to be an ass. "It was a top secret weapons prototype stolen from Russia, supposedly." 

"Supposedly? You don't know if it is or isn't?" 

"We know what it is, we just want to be sure we have the real thing." 

"Oh." He nodded in understanding, then asked, "What's her name? Really?" 

"Ginger? It turns out she's really Dorothea Vance from Troy, Michigan." 

"Dorothea?" He repeated, laughing. "Oh man, and I thought my name was dorky." 

Roberts cracked a weak smile; he must have thought the same thing. "It seems she was still with Gabriel." 

"Gabriel?" He repeated, pretending to be confused. "He's dead." 

Roberts sat back in his chair with a sigh, crossing his arms over his chest. "He is now." 

"What do you mean?" 

"Shortly after we collected Vance and Peacemeal, we got a call from the Santa Monica P.D. about what they thought was a drug related shooting incident on a pier there. It turned out one of the victims was on the wanted list for his participation in the bank heist and hostage situation last year - one of Gabriel's crew. It hardly seemed like a coincidence, so we checked it out, and it turned out the man killed inside the boat looked a lot like Gabriel, with a hair cut and dye and thirty extra pounds on him." 

Stan pretended he was in shock. "Are you shitting me?" 

But Roberts looked unimpressed by his performance. "The bullets used on his crew were a special type of dum dums, often used by the Mossad." 

"The Mossad? Shit." Stan didn't know a lot about ammunition, but he did know dum dums were bullets that exploded on impact for maximum damage. No wonder Gabriel's crew fell so fast. "Didn't Gabriel used to work for them?" 

"The real Gabriel Shear, yeah. It has all the earmarks of a professional revenge hit, but the Mossad denies all knowledge of it, of course." 

"The real Gabriel Shear?" 

"The guy you toasted in the chopper was the real Gabriel Shear, but not the one you knew. He took the man's identity, for unknown reasons." 

"So who was Gabriel really?" 

Roberts shrugged, still eyeing him like he was looking for a chink in his armor. "We're not sure. It would seem like he doesn't exist, if you believe the records." 

"Do you?" 

"When it comes to this guy I don't know what to believe," Roberts admitted. 

"But he's dead, right? This was the guy?" 


	7. Part 7 The End

Roberts continued to study him. Stan knew he knew, but again, without proof of anything, what could he do? "Yeah. I doubt he could find two body doubles, plastic surgery or not." 

He sighed and held his face in his hands, only partially faking relief. Even after coming face to face with him, he doubted his own reality. When you dealt with the insane, you could feel your own sense of sanity slip. ( Assuming, of course, he had any sanity left. ) 

"Gabriel was the only one not killed by dum dums," Roberts continued. "He was killed with hollow points from a gun found in his own hand." 

Stan let his hands fall away. "Are you saying he committed suicide?" 

"No. Even if he was startled I doubt he'd shoot himself in the shoulder, and then rip out a hunk of his own neck. No, my guess is he was tortured." 

"Tortured?" The surprise was genuine. 

"Somebody wanted him to hurt. No easy death there." Roberts stared at him hard, waiting for him to crack, to give him some sign that he knew that wasn't the real story, but Stan didn't take the bait. 

"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," he said, meeting Roberts' gaze unflinchingly. 

He snorted derisively. "Yeah, that's what Peterson said. Looked like the place had been cleaned up too, in spite of the gore. Someone got rid of some footprints, other blood based evidence before the P.D. arrived." 

"So again, looks like a professional job, huh?" 

"Everything but Gabriel's actual death. That still looks like a personal event." 

"I'm guessing a lot of people wanted him dead." 

"I'm guessing you're right. So tell me, Stan, where were you three days ago?" 

He pretended to be surprised, but not overly so. "Me?" He scoffed. "In Canada. Why? Do you think I actually beat up Ginger - sorry, Dorothea - and stole Peacekeeper?" 

"Peacemeal." 

"Whatever." 

Roberts sat forward, unfolding his arms and leaning them on the table. "Do you have any proof you were there? Witnesses?" 

Stan sat back, continuing with the astonished act, letting it merge naturally into suspicion. "I was house hunting. I bought a Coke at a gas station, maybe I can dig up the receipt for it out of my car. You can't possibly be serious, Roberts." 

"Agent Roberts," he corrected archly. "So, house hunting, huh? Is that why you're in Seattle?" 

As soon as he could catch a flight, Stan had come here and started using his real credit cards - not gratuitously, but just enough that the Feds could find the paper trail. He'd only paid for a hotel room, a restaurant meal, and a laptop with his cards. 

"No, I found a house. I was down here visiting a friend of mine from college. He's one of the Microserfs - sold out for the money, but hey, who am I to judge?" 

That was true - Sajeet Asna was one of his 'real world' buddies in college, a natural programmer with a frightening gift for higher mathematics. They had kept in loose touch ever since, and he was one of the few people to ever visit him while in Leavenworth. A good guy, his whole life was computers: he had no family, few friends outside the programming realm, and little interest in the outside world. But he was very loyal to the friends he had, and as awful as it was, he knew Sajeet would back up whatever Stan said here. 

Roberts probably knew that too, judging from the scowl on his face. And Sajeet was as clean as a nun; he didn't even have a parking ticket to his name. His testimony would probably be considered more reliable than the Pope's. After all, Sajeet didn't appear to have any creativity - how could he fabricate a story? 

"Sajeet Asna," Roberts said, and it sounded like he was trying to make it a question, but failed. 

Stan let his suspicion grow. "How did you know that?" 

"I arrested you, remember? We have a file on all your associates then. As proud as they were of you fucking over Carnivore, most of your fellow cracker buds deserted you once you got thrown in the big L. But he didn't." 

He knew Roberts had called him a cracker to bug him, but he refused to take the bait. "Sajeet's a straight guy. Leave him alone." 

"I intend to. I wish more people were as law abiding as he was." 

"Including me?" 

"Especially you, Stanley." He leaned forward with a sigh, and said, in a low voice, "Cut the shit. I know you're involved in this somehow. Ginger said you implied you were freelancing for the Mossad to get Gabriel, although at the end she decided you were making that up. But of course, then Gabriel ends up dead in what looks like a Mossad hit, and she changes her mind again. Truth time here. You know anything you say now will be inadmissible in a court, so why not cut the crap?" 

Stan sat back, feeling obscurely sorry for Roberts, old nemesis and brief, uncomfortable ally. They both knew he was involved in this, and yet Roberts couldn't prove it ( who would believe a known thief, terrorist, and liar such as Ginger? ), and Stan had no intention of incriminating himself. Even if he couldn't nail him for this, Roberts would dig up something else to nail him on. "There's no crap to cut. I'm trying to get on with my life here, such as it is. I am not a master criminal or a terrorist, and I'm certainly not working for the Mossad. I'm a washed up hacker single father, with a nice criminal record that guarantees I have to invest well or end up on the street within a year." 

Roberts grimaced humorously. "Washed up. Interesting term there. You are about twice the age of your average hacker - " 

"Gee, thanks." 

" - but you have more patience and experience than your average pimple faced MUD junkie trying to crack into NORAD. You can more than compete, Stanley. That's what bothers me. It's impossible that any one man could do all that Ginger claimed you did. But then again, a man with diligence, planning, and a big helping of connections and luck could have. Considering all you've been through, you're a very lucky man." 

That made Stan laugh genuinely, no acting required. "Lucky? Ah shit, I'd hate to see my life if I was unlucky." 

Roberts continued to stare at him, briefly glancing outside, at the people passing by the window. He didn't see his partner, and wondered if he actually did come alone, or if he was doing a distance surveillance. 

"How's Holly doing?" He asked, as if they really were just two old friends catching up. 

"Still in therapy, but aren't we all?" Stan ran his hand through his hair, suddenly very tired of all of this. "She's coping better than I am, overall. But I guess she had to grow up fast." 

Roberts nodded, at least sympathizing with Holly's position. "So where are you going to live?" 

It wasn't quite a third degree, but almost. Still, Roberts could find out some other way. "Vancouver. Just closed on a two bedroom ranch style house in an exurb, close enough to the city to be interesting, but far enough out to avoid the traffic." 

"British Columbia?" Stan nodded. "Nice area. Great Chinese food." 

He shrugged. "Good schools too. Holly liked it." 

"So she's still alive. Ginger said you'd gone over the edge 'cause she was killed in a car crash. She thinks you had a head injury or something." 

Stan chuckled, helping himself to a gulp of his cooling mocha. "Really? Why is this news to me?" 

"Yeah, that part of her story didn't check. She said it was an article in a Boston paper, partially corroborated by hospital files, but they thought they were plants. She said you told her yourself the info was real, only you altered them so you'd appear to be dead as well." 

"Do I look dead to you?" 

He didn't look terribly amused. "Not completely. The newspaper records were clean, so was the hospital's. But anybody could have planted an article and phony files and extracted them without a trace. If they were good." 

Stan raised a curious eyebrow at him. "Are you saying I'm good?" 

"I'm saying you're diligent." 

Stan shrugged and took a sip of his mocha, refraining from commenting further. Roberts stared at him for a few seconds, then sighed, rolled his eyes, and crossed his arms over his chest. "You're a piece of work, Stan." 

"Is that a compliment or an insult?" 

"Both." 

"So what's gonna happen to Ging - I mean Dorothea - now?" 

"Well, even if she manages to get a deal, she'll get the book thrown at her. In times likes these, no one wants to be lenient to a known associate of terrorists." 

Stan nodded. That tracked. He almost felt sorry for her ... but only almost. "I wonder how she'll do in prison." 

"She's pretty tough - I think she'll do as well as you did." 

Stan gave him a hard, humorless grin. Roberts did like to put him in place, just in case he forgot it. "Well, bully for her. Give her my regards, and tell her not to drop the soap." 

Roberts briefly quirked up a corner of his mouth, but didn't commit to a smile. "Aren't you at all interested in Peacemeal?" 

Stan rolled his shoulders nonchalantly, feigning complete disinterest. "Should I be?" 

"If it worked, it would have wiped out computer hard drives for about a mile outside of the blast radius, so yeah, you should be." 

"If it worked?" 

"The tech boys are still going over the suitcase, but so far it seems as if the case had never been opened before. If so, it would confirm what the Pentagon assholes have been telling us, that a non - nuclear EMP weapon is a myth." 

"I don't understand." 

"It was a scam. The bomb in the case looked complex and fancy, but was just a standard non - nuclear suitcase bomb, with the explosive force of a bottle rocket. The guy who brought it over was probably out to make a quick buck and duck out of the country before they used it." 

"Did you ask him about it?" 

Roberts shook his head, and seemed ticked off with him. "He was found in a bathroom stall in LAX. It looked like a suicide, but it had all the earmarks of a classic Gabriel hit. We figured he tried to run after the disappearance of Peacemeal, and Gabriel figured he was trying to fuck him over, so he had him taken out." 

Stan had to fight the urge to react, because that would confirm that he had something to do with this. But it had never occurred to him that M. K. would get caught in the net - and wasn't that sloppy of him? He knew Gabriel liked to tie up his loose ends. He should have anticipated a hit on M.K. ... but what exactly could he have done about it? Stan knew he'd have to feel bad about it later, not now, not in front of Roberts. "Even in death, he was having people whacked?" 

"This was before his death, but I'd put little past Gabriel." 

Stan nodded in agreement, and looked down at the murky dregs of his coffee. Was he ever going to feel any better? Well, at least he could guarantee Holly would be safe from Gabriel and his grab bag of thugs - that was some kind of victory. 

"What are you up to, Stanley?" Roberts asked, surprising him. But he had enough control to stifle any expression before it rose to his face. 

"What do you mean?" 

"What I mean is am I gonna have to spearhead another task force to take you down?" 

He never liked Roberts - how could you like the man who sent you to prison? - but he had helped him get Holly back, so he at least owed him an answer for that alone. "No. Holly deserves as normal a life as she can get from now on, and I'm going to try and give that to her. I can't be a father to her back in prison." 

"Good, Stan, remember that." Roberts stood up, and gazed down at him impassively, as if trying to decide on a final verdict. 

"Gabriel deserved worse than he got," he finally said, his expression grim. "And whoever our mysterious benefactor was, he managed to have better intell than all our departments - we didn't know Peacemeal was in the States until we got the phone call." He let that sink in, and then added, "Be good to that little girl of yours. And Canada or not, take one step over the line, Stan, and I will have you nailed to the wall." 

Stan nodded, and Roberts turned and left the Starbucks for good, walking casually down the street and out of view. 

He sat for several more minutes, staring at the brightly painted nothing on the far wall, and wondered if the real Peacemeal was a dud. 

The suitcase he left with Ginger was a decoy, a fake Peacemeal. The real Peacemeal he had removed the night he stole it, wondering what the hell he was going to do with it until he passed that slightly run down old pet cemetery near Monterey Park. That was when he went back to the Home Depot, got the appropriate gear, and buried the contents of the suitcase - what appeared to be a large lead rectangle with a digital readout - in a makeshift grave behind the weeping willow, covering it with a loose plank of board before covering it with dirt and an intact piece of sod he had cut out with the shovel before digging. He figured if his plan went all to shit, and Gabriel somehow figured out all his aliases and was able to retrace his route, Gabriel would still never get the real Peacemeal. There was absolutely nothing connecting him to the pet cemetery in Monterey Park, except he drove by it. The fake had been ready to go, and waiting in his trunk; he took the suitcase with him, only to plant it with everything else at Buena Sierra Estates. 

After Gabriel's death, Stan drove back to Monterey Park, and dug up the real Peacemeal. Now that his plan had worked, he was in the awkward position of figuring out what to do with what could well be one of the most dangerous weapons in existence. 

It did look phony to Stan, even though he was no expert with bombs. Still, he carefully took off the metal casing, and found the interior to be a complicated collection of wires, electrical coils, magnets, processors, and god knew what else, but it still didn't look like some EMP superweapon. Of course, he had no idea what one would look like, but he had a feeling it wasn't that. 

Finally, as dawn was starting to break, and he knew he'd miss his flight to Seattle if he didn't get his ass in gear soon, he took action. He cut all the wires surrounding what looked to be the detonator and its fuel cell, and went to an auto junkyard in Ontario, California. The lot was open, so, carrying the remains of Peacemeal in an old backpack, he went to the junkyard owner and started inquiring about parts for or equivalent to a late '60's model Corvette. He wasn't sure they had any, so as he consulted whatever it was guys like that consulted, Stan started searching through the junkyard, and found a convenient moment to chuck the backpack into the car compactor. He loitered around until the man operating the car crane dropped in the already accordioned and partially stripped body of what looked like some late model, cream and primer grey colored Ford Fairlane, and let the compactor do its thing. 

Stan was braced for some kind of impact, in case he was wrong and the thing was still explosive ( if it had ever been - he wasn't sure ), but the Ford was crushed into a cube only slightly bigger than your average microwave, and there were lots of little metal detritus, some bearing shreds of a black nylon backpack. 

The junkyard didn't have any of the parts he was pretending to look for, so he thanked the man and left as the car crane operator continued turning car after car into metal scrap, pulverizing what remained of Peacemeal to dust. It struck Stan as somewhat ironic and sort of blackly comic: a technological weapon that could have devastated a major city, destroyed by a car compactor - a piece of antiquated equipment, judging from the layers of rust - in Nowhere, California. It seemed like justice somehow. 

Could it have worked? Had M.K. actually perfected the mobile, non - nuclear EMP bomb? He didn't know. No one would ever know, because Peacemeal was as dead as Gabriel. 

Stan smiled to himself as he checked his watch, and decided it was high past time he got back to Canada and pulled Holly out of that boarding school. 

Maybe he had found something to feel good about after all. 

_______ 

The End  
_______ 


End file.
